GREAT FALLS, MT

A pleasingly offbeat memoir of growing up biracial on the Montana plains.

Watts, a comedian and house bandleader for the Late Late Show With James Corden, writes of his boyhood and teenage years in Great Falls, an Air Force town along the Missouri River that helped shape his future life as “a musician, comedian, and consummate weirdo.” The author was at first daunted by Montana’s trademark big sky, “so huge it felt like it could swallow me up at any moment,” but he soon came to be at home in a place that, in its own way, accepted him for who he was, even though he was “one of nine Black kids” in his high school and thus “an unknown quantity.” Early on in life, he writes, “I absorbed the reality of my jumbled identity, and I embraced it.” Among memories of star-crossed teen romance, the donning of various masks of identity—e.g., “the sensitive James Bond, the funny James Bond, the James Bond who respected women” and Duckie of John Hughes film fame—and occasional forays into behavior that he is sometimes reticent to discuss (not that it stops him from writing candidly), Watts deftly describes the formative 1980s pop cultural landmarks that formed him. Although his hometown had its shortcomings, quickly revealed once he took up residence after high school in Seattle and then Los Angeles, he writes, affectionately, that it allowed him to be whatever he wanted to be—which, in the end, turned out to be “weird, even among other weird people.” It all makes for a lively, endlessly entertaining rejoinder to Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City with a dash of Questlove for good measure. Watts captures a once-fresh era now rapidly receding into historical memory.

Fans of Watts will revel in this enjoyable stroll into the past, and those new to him could have no better introduction.