Truly

Richie's memoir spends its first third on Tuskegee, a self-described shy and undiagnosed-ADHD childhood, before the Commodores show up around page 166, a structural choice reviewers have split on, with some calling the slow wind-up the book's emotional foundation and others finding it padded. What distinguishes it from the standard music-industry victory lap is Richie's willingness to sit with discomfort rather than narrate his career as a string of inevitabilities; the anxiety and self-doubt aren't framed as obstacles overcome so much as ongoing companions. The back half, covering solo superstardom and the decades since, reads thinner than the coming-of-age material, as if the destination interested him less than the journey. It's a gratitude-soaked book more than a tell-all, and better for the parts before the fame arrives than after.