Al Pacino's Sonny Boy Memoir Arrives Monday

Three of his closest childhood friends died of heroin. That is not a line from one of his film roles. It is one of the few things Al Pacino says about himself in a book that lands on the Serbian market Monday, September 7. The story of the Bronx, of his mother and grandfather, and of those three friends, is what gives the memoir a weight that has nothing to do with what Pacino later became, and it is what immediately sets this book apart from the usual Hollywood recollection.

Sonny Boy is published by Laguna, translated by Branislava Radevic-Stojiljkovic, and will be available in Delfi bookstores, through Laguna’s reader clubs, and on delfi.rs and laguna.rs. The title, according to the publisher, is the nickname Pacino carried as a child in the South Bronx, the poor neighborhood he left behind to become one of the most influential actors in film history.

The broad outline of that path is familiar. The details the book opens up are not. Pacino landed his first major role in 1971, and by 1975 he had already made Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, films that turned his name into a byword for a certain kind of acting seriousness. The Oscar for Best Actor came later, for Scent of a Woman in 1992, alongside two Tony Awards, two Emmys and an American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award. That list of honors is well known. What the memoir does is push it to the background.

Laguna is explicit that Sonny Boy is not built on scandal or on a celebrity’s love affairs, a distinction worth taking seriously, since the actor’s autobiography as a genre usually lives on exactly those chapters. Here the focus stays on craft: preparing for roles, and an artist’s relationship with an industry that wears him down. The book is bound up with the history of American theater and with what later came to be called New Hollywood, so it tracks a whole movement, not only one career.

What makes this framing credible, rather than a marketing line, is that Pacino does not spare himself. He writes about his own professional insecurity, about alcohol, about parenting and about financial trouble, three or four subjects that could each carry a chapter on their own and that rarely appear together in an account of a man whose career, from the outside, looked close to perfect. Success in the book, as the publisher describes it, is not shown as the inevitable result of talent but as a chain of circumstances in which Pacino narrowly avoided a very different fate, with an admission of bad decisions, weaknesses and chance that shaped him as much as any role did. That is a more honest starting point than the usual story of a man who always knew where he was headed, and it is likely why the book, on its original release, quickly became a New York Times bestseller, while People magazine and Kirkus Reviews both named it among the ten best books of the year.

The critical reception the book got in its original English edition backs up that reading. People wrote that a film star’s memoir carries real literary weight, calling it funny, perceptive and personal, in other words, not a read that functions as a promotional tie-in to a career. American host and comedian Conan O’Brien said, of the book, that he could not remember ever reading a better autobiography, a judgment that is hard to come by from someone who spent decades on his own show listening to guests promote exactly these kinds of books.

For a reader who knows Pacino only from The Godfather or Scent of a Woman, Sonny Boy offers something other than the expected addition to a filmography: a man admitting that luck, not talent alone, decided whether he would end up a legend or just another name lost from the South Bronx. That honesty, more than the list of roles, is the reason to pick the book up.