It’s a bumpy ride. Fasten your seat belts.

What could a 23-year-old say that would possibly be worth preserving in a book?

That is the basic challenge singer Ronan Keating faces in writing Life Is a Rollercoaster. For while everyone has a story to tell, not everyone can tell it well – and even fewer may want to listen. In this case, the reader may do well to heed Bette Davis’ advice: "Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride."

The first hump on the road is apparently the lack of material. Biographies are only as interesting as the lives they portray, a fact which means that Keating has to unearth an aspect of himself that we don’t already know. But at his age, what else can he offer but a narrative that departs little from what the press has "always already" presented? To wit, "Here is the man who, through ‘energy, ambition, and cola,’ rises above his Irish working-class origins to become the international superstar-family man-role model at 23."

We read, for instance, about Keating’s first recording session. He learns that the producer has advised his manager to sack him because he "can’t sing." An infuriated Keating vows to prove himself. Three years later, Boyzone is a success, and our hero gets a chance to rebuff the same producer. Vision plus hard work plus determination equals success – a motif familiar and on clear days, even inspiring. Of course, cynics see the book as another case of vindictive vanity glorified. But those are cynics, indeed.

"Vanity" such as Keating’s (if vanity it is) isn’t what disappoints so much as his reticence on personal matters. Part of the pleasure of biography, after all, is that it allows us to be voyeurs. Keating, however, often covers the tabloid-worthy bits of his life from our eyes, which ironically are what we are curious about. We don’t get to read much about his troubled relationship with his father, his alleged pre-marital chastity, the tension among his band mates, Stephen Gately’s sexuality, or his well documented (because rarely captured) tantrums.

If ever Keating reveals a "bad side," he is quick to append a moral. (Indeed, like Sancho Panza, he punctuates stories with such tired proverbs as "What goes around comes around" or worse, "The footballer who trains the hardest will reap the rewards.") After confessing that he used to cut classes, for instance, he writes, "It would be very neat to say that all my lazy days at home spent listening to music acted as a different kind of education. But, come on, that’s not really the case, is it? That I’m doing music now is very lucky and I wouldn’t recommend all that bunking to anyone."

So sober an attitude is certainly commendable in life, but like other sober things, is somewhat of a soporific in art. Proof is that the book is most engaging when Keating is playing the "right eejit" – when he is fighting a school bully, stealing out of hotels, dodging fans in a cartoonist cat-and-mouse chase, or getting drunk and nearly arrested. The psychology of reading biography is beyond the scope of this article, but it seems that people derive cathartic (perverse?) pleasure from reading about other people’s scandals, shenanigans, tragedies, and embarrassments. In Keating’s case, where the slate is virtually immaculate, this "will to ill" is doubly insistent, but alas, is doubly denied.

The other impediment on the Rollercoaster track is simply that Keating is no James Joyce or even Frank McCourt. His problem is common among beginning writers, viz., striking the balance between telling and showing. For example, he tells us, "Now I understand why rock ‘n’ roll bands throw TVs out of their hotel windows," as though meaning to segue to the loneliness and insecurities behind the "shmile on his feysh." But he halts. Elsewhere, he mars an otherwise effective scene by stating the obvious ("It was priceless, the innocence of it.").

Still, for the most part, Keating manages to draw his readers in. The chapter on his mother’s death, for instance, is moving in its simplicity. Here is no breast-beating nor gnashing of teeth – and that’s precisely why it works. Keating at his most vulnerable is also Keating at his most palpable, and hence, most appealing. A man who has gained everything but who loses what matters most to him – how can anyone not sympathize with a hero thus humanized? Shades of Achilles (or perhaps more apropos, Cuchulain)?

Keating also exudes a disarming honesty that is sometimes brutal and sometimes charmingly naive. Of fame, he writes, "People have supported me to help me earn this and it’d be disrespectful to turn round and say it’s worthless." Elsewhere, he states, "One of the saddest individuals has got to be Michael Jackson." Of his manager, we read, "He’d take us to the opening of an envelope if he thought it would get our mug shots into the morning papers." And the coup de grace. "I’m basically a product, Ronan Keating Pop Star..."

And when he abandons the cliché, Keating does manage a quip or two, which though not so sparkling as Truman Capote’s, are striking in their own way, e.g., "Everything in Los Angeles is business, business, business. And more serious business seems to be done at meal times than at any other stage of the day."

If not the man, then the milieu is interesting. Keating’s is Ireland before the economic boom, the Ireland suggestive of contemporary Philippine society – down to the brain drain, the big families, the so-called talangka mentality, and those religious medallions hung on car mirrors. Of interest to Filipino readers is Keating’s portrait of the Philippines. He recalls giving grapes to a beggar on a street, and "suddenly, it was like a swarm of locusts descending on us. Kids came from nowhere and we gave them out all the fruit. Money was nothing, all they wanted was the food."

Rollercoaster is certainly no Angela’s Ashes, as Keating himself knows and warns us. The cultural critic may find it useful as a specimen of mythic self-fashioning and, given the inset photos, of popular iconography. (One photo, as a writer-friend observed, shows Keating posed like Peter Pan – or Tinkerbell, depending on one’s persuasion.) Lovers of things Irish may relish the book’s Hiberinisms (e.g., "Jaysus," "feck," "gobsmacked," Michael Collins, Killarney, Kildare, and Country Kerry). But unless one is a fan of Keating’s, this ride is perhaps too uneven – and too expensive (P700) to sit through.