I Am Brian Wilson

My life has been written about over and over again, and that's mostly okay with me. Other people can talk about my life. Sometimes they'll get it right and sometimes they'll get it wrong. For me, when I think back across my own life, there are so many things that are painful. Sometimes I don't like discussing them. Sometimes I don't even like remembering them. But as I get older, the shape of that pain has changed.

Sometimes memories come back to me when I least expect them. Maybe that's the only way it works when you've lived the life I've lived: starting a band with my brothers that was managed by my father, watching my father become difficult and then impossible, watching myself become difficult and then impossible, watching women I loved come and go, watching children come into the world, watching my brothers get older, watching them pass out of the world. Some of those things shaped me. Others scarred me. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.

When I watched my father fly into a rage and take swings at me and my brothers, was that shaping or scarring? When we watched him grow frustrated with his day job and take solace in music, was that shaping or scarring? Those are all memories but I can't get to them all at once. I've had a whole lifetime to take them in. Now I have a whole book to put them out there.

Excerpt from I Am Brian Wilson.