I just finished Apropos of Nothing. So that no one could say that I’m giving Allen a lot of money by buying the book, I waited until it was available from abe.com. This a website for used and remaindered bookstores to sell their books online. Anything you buy there is a copy that someone read and got rid of, a copy that was sent for free to someone to review which they got rid of, a book from a library that the library didn’t need anymore and got rid of, a book from a bookstore that they couldn’t sell and got rid of, or a book from a publisher that they couldn’t sell and got rid of.
It’s called (right there on the cover) an autobiography, but I would call it more like a memoir, since it’s not really organized tightly on his timeline and doesn’t tell us very much about some points in his life. A lot of it is just random anecdotes. A lot of it is Allen’s meanderings about how he liked certain other artists. A lot of it is just his personal opinions about what parts of his own works he liked, and I disagree with many of them.
He talks a lot about the things he’s been accused of. If you want to read his side of the issues, this is what you need to read. Despite that fact that I’ve seen a lot of his films, read a lot of his books of humorous essays, and read some biographies of him, I’m no more an expert of the things he’s been accused of than any other random person off the street. I’ve never even met any of the people he talks about except once when I talked with Diane Keaton for about thirty seconds while getting her signature on her book The House That Pinterest Built when she did a signing at a bookstore near me.