Extreme-ly Interesting! (Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography - Sharon Osbourne)

Member Name: karenuk

Product:	Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography - Sharon Osbourne
Date:	12/02/06 (664 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fascinating, informative, a great read.

Disadvantages: Swearing, bizarre incidents of animal cruelty and toilet habits included!

I’m not a big fan of Sharon Osbourne, but I enjoy reading autobiographies and when I saw she had one out, I decided it could be an interesting read, so I borrowed it from the library. It’s quite a large book, 372 pages, but I finished it in a few days. It was certainly a book I wanted to keep reading and it was never boring.

I didn’t know much about Sharon Osbourne before reading this. Obviously, I knew she was married to Ozzy (and the only song of his I like is Paranoid) and I know who Kelly and Jack are (but hadn’t heard of oldest daughter, Aimee). I had never seen more than five minutes of ‘The Osbournes’ TV series, but I did know Sharon from The X-Factor.

Well, after reading this, I feel I know a whole lot more about Sharon. The book is filled with information of her life from childhood onwards. I would have liked to have found out more about her children, but I guess she wants to keep that side private. Don’t misunderstand me, she does mention her kids a lot, but I didn’t really feel I got to ‘know’ them.

I knew very little about the work Sharon had done, besides being an X-Factor judge and Ozzy’s manager. I was interested to read how she was involved with the music business from a young age, initially through her father, Don Arden (who managed a long line of groups and singers over the years, including ELO) and then independently. Now I understand why she was picked for The X-Factor, as her history in the music business is certainly comparable to Louis Walsh and Simon Cowell.

So it was interesting and informative. But the whole tone of the autobiography was a bit strange at times. I expected the swearing (Let’s face it, both Ozzy and Sharon are famous for their love of expletives!) but there were other things I didn’t expect and I found shocking. Her world has included violence since her youth. Her father was happy to use “bully-boy” tactics in his home and professional life, often using heavies or physically giving someone “a good kicking”.

While this was shocking enough, it didn’t stop there. Sharon has two strange idiosyncrasies she decided to share with the world – she wets herself when she laughs too much and she often takes revenge on someone by defecating on their possessions! Now, I may be prudish, but I didn’t enjoy the descriptions of urine-soaked clothes or poo-covered items, which she seemed to find hilarious! Personally, I would want to keep the wetting completely private and couldn’t bring myself to do the second.

Sharon is a mixed up concoction. She is classy but vulgar, warm but distant, loving but filled with hate. I wondered what her motivation was to write this book. I decided partway through it was to get revenge on everyone she had feuded with over the years, especially her father, but by the end of it, she mentions a lawsuit where she owed over two million dollars and needed money fast, so I guess that was the reason why she wrote this. (Well, Penelope Dening wrote it, but you know what I mean!)

I certainly wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of Sharon. She verbally attacks many people in the book, including Steve, the winner of the first series of The X-Factor. While I wasn’t keen on him that much myself, she doesn’t really seem to give decent reasons for hating him as much as she does.

She does care about some people throughout her life, but on balance, probably hates more than loves. She says she believes family to be important – and her love for Ozzy and her kids cannot be disputed – but she disowns her mother and has very little time for her siblings. Not that any of them sound particularly nice, but they are family after all.

Her relationship with Ozzy is a weird one too. She describes his battles with alcohol and drugs and his repeated forays into rehab. She also explains how he was regularly unfaithful to her for years and – most shocking of all – their volatile relationship which regularly involved the two of them physically fighting. She throws things at him, he punches her. She kicks him, he slaps her. He has dislocated her jaw. Although she didn’t use the word, she describes what sounds like rape to me and he was once arrested for her attempted murder!

Now, I understand love – but would you put up with this from your loved one? I felt some sympathy for him, when she describes his accident on the quad bike that nearly cost him his life, but then in hospital, he accuses her of having an affair (and if we are to believe her, she has never been unfaithful to him) then discharges himself.

I know if I ever wrote an autobiography, I would try to paint my loved ones in a positive light, but despite repeated declarations of her love for Ozzy, I can’t understand why. After reading this, I find it hard to think of Ozzy as anything other than a nasty piece of work.

So it’s a bit of a strange one really. I don’t know if I like Sharon or not and I have no respect at all for her husband and feel I know little about her children. But I really enjoyed the book; it was fascinating, covered all the major areas of her life and was a compelling read.




Extreme - by Sharon Osbourne with Penelope Dening
Published by Time Warner Books
ISBN 0-316-73131-5
£18.99 hardback
Published in 2005

Summary: The autobiography of Sharon OSbourne