Okay, I’ll admit it; I first picked up Life is a Rollercoaster by Ronan Keating for the pictures. He is very pretty.  However while the photos the book provided did not disappoint (I’ll admit that I was inclined to lovingly stroke some of them), what was much more impressive is the fact that it is a wholly enjoyable and yes, even refreshing book.

Keating begins with the beginning, his childhood as the youngest of about a thousand siblings in the suburbs of Dublin.  Surprisingly, Keating had a happy childhood.  Not a hint of mental, physical, or sexual abuse, unlike the majority of celeb autobiographies. (Anyone remember how Geri Halliwell claimed that she was mistreated as a child because she was made to wash the dishes?  Please.)  And although he did have literally hundreds of brothers and sisters, he was not deprived.  He always got what he asked for at Christmas, the family went on many holidays around Ireland, and he got he’s hair cut for free because his mother was hairdresser (actually his childhood sounds loads better than mine). Keating instead elaborates on the many scrapes he got into with the help of his older brother Gary and the many sports successes he had as a youth.

Of course, the meat of the book is about his days with Boyzone, but here once again we do not find any tawdry tales or scurrilous scandals.  Instead Keating supplies us with revelations of a much more interesting sort; the laddish hijinx behind the scenes. Boyzone’s favorite activity was hitting the pub, and most of Keating’s stories end with him laid up in bed with a massive hangover, but for entertainment the lads seemed to much prefer was pulling off practical jokes rather than pulling girls.  The most elaborate joke had Ronan and a couple of the other boys hiding in another band member’s room.  As the landlady of the B&B they were at had told them that the room was haunted, they thought it would be great fun play ghost and frighten their unsuspecting friend.  The group hid and waited and waited and waited some more, but their friend never returned to his room.  Turns out he was so scared by the landlady’s story he decided to sleep on the drawing room sofa rather than in his room.

However, it would not be a real celebrity book if there were not any name-dropping moments, and Keating is happy to oblige, providing a list of stars who are ‘good, ordinary blokes.’  These include: all of U2 (but in particular the drummer Larry), George Michael, and Elton John.  Apparently these are the type of celebrities who enjoy sitting down, having a few drinks and a bit of a natter with younger, rising stars.  The one star who did not impress Ronan was Michael Jackson.  In fact, it would be fairer to say that Keating feels sorry for him because Jackson has lost the string.  When Keating encountered Jackson, Jackson was hiding from the public in a back corridor of a hotel surrounded by dozens of bodyguards and other keepers and wearing a mask.  As Ronan points out, it’s a lot of fun to be famous and one of the greatest crimes of all is when you become so enraptured with your own fame that you cease to enjoy it.

Ronan’s prose is confident and punctuated often with exclamations of the word ‘feck’ (just replace the ‘e’ with the letter ‘u’ and you’ll now what Keating is on about).  His tone remains charmingly self-effacing throughout the book, even admitting when his son Jack was born that his poor wife Wivvy ‘now had two kids to look after.’   But the best proof that Keating does not hold himself too precious, and the reason why I find it impossible not to love Ronan, is when he admitted that once during a photo shoot he called a chaise-lounge a mangetout.  After the photographer corrected him, he simply laughed it off and said, ‘I knew it was one of those double-barrel French words.’  It takes a big man to offer up such an embarrassing anecdote, and the fact that he does simply proves that Ronan Keating really is a nice boy.