I don't often read non-fiction, and even more rarely do I read personal non-fiction, like memoirs and autobiographies. Right now I'm reading The View From the Cheap Seats, which is a collection of essays and speeches by Neil Gaiman. Technically, I guess it's not a memoir, but many of his essays and speeches are autobiographical.
What I'm really enjoying about this book - aside from the fact that I like his style and his humor - is that Neil's stories about himself as a child or young man make him sound almost like a character in one of his books. He relates the tale of the "feral child raised by patient librarians" in more than one of these essays. He tells of the time that he and his friends encountered a Playboy-style magazine at the age of eight and he was much less interested in the fact that there were "naked ladies" in the magazine than he was by the fact that one of these was a magician's assistant. In the same essay, he discusses how he was called into the principal's office for repeating a joke he heard with the f-word in it and when asked what other four-letter words he knew genuinely assumed this to be some kind of vocabulary test and started naming every word he could think of with only four letters in it.
His descriptions of real people as characters he could have written extends to other authors he has made friends with. He relates Diana Wynne Jones's comically bad luck at travel and the time that he was with her when a door fell off their airplane (fortunately, before take off). He describes the first time he met Terry Pratchett. This was during a time at which both of them were still trying to figure out how to make their way in the world of writing, including each of them seeking out what Gaiman terms a "Proper Author Hat." Neil confesses he eventually gave up and bought a black leather jacket instead, while Terry finally found a hat that has become his signature look.
I'm maybe about half-way through the book and am looking forward to the real characters I have still yet to meet, including Gaiman's wife, Amanda Palmer. I discovered Amanda Palmer's music around the same time I discovered Neil's writing. The first song of hers that I latched onto is about a girl who creates a "coin-operated boy" because she has no luck with real men. The music video with its white-faced makeup, striped tights, and somewhat steam-punk aesthetic were right up 22-ish-year-old me's alley.
I actually don't remember what the first thing I read by Neil Gaiman was. But I think if you had told me 15 years ago that he was going to marry the singer who wrote "Coin-Operated Boy" I would have said, "well, yeah. Obviously."