Will Smith Audiobooks

Will: the memoir of a rapper turned sitcom star turned Hollywood's biggest draw

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.6/5 average

23 listener ratings

Who is Will Smith?

Few careers have been engineered quite this deliberately. Will Smith, born in West Philadelphia in 1968, was a Grammy-winning rapper before he was twenty, one half of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and then very nearly bankrupt once the tax bill arrived.

What followed was among the most calculated ascents in American entertainment. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air made him a television fixture; Independence Day and Men in Black made him a global box office name; Ali and The Pursuit of Happyness brought the Academy Award nominations and the serious roles he had been angling for all along. In 2022 he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for King Richard.

He has spoken often about the machinery behind all of it: the discipline, the relentless self-improvement, the fear underneath. That combination of showmanship and unusually frank self-examination makes him a more interesting memoirist than most film stars, and it is precisely the register in which Will is written.

Will Smith in audiobooks

Will, written with Mark Manson and published in 2021, is an unusually candid celebrity memoir. Smith goes back to a childhood shadowed by his father’s violence, traces the ambition that grew out of it, and is markedly harder on himself than the genre normally permits. It won an NAACP Image Award.

He narrates it himself, and this is the rare case where an author reading is the point rather than a pleasant extra. He performs it: he sings, does the voices, and slips into the timing of the stand-up and the sitcom whenever the story calls for it. Sixteen hours pass quickly in his company.

It rewards anyone interested in ambition and what it costs. Have a look below to see what is available from him here.