In his dialogue “The Critic as Artist,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “It is always Judas who writes the biography.” What impressed me about the actor Eric Roberts, whose memoir, Runaway Train, comes out this week, was how willing he was to betray himself.
Eric and I worked together on the book throughout the dark days of the pandemic. Whenever our attention would drift, we’d keep ourselves in the game by conjuring up possible titles. Eric always came back to “How about ‘Julia Roberts’s Brother’?” I’m still not sure how much of a joke he meant it to be. It was Eric, after all, who was being groomed to be the movie star at a time when Julia was still more a product of Smyrna, Georgia, than of Malibu.
