“I remember locking myself in the bathroom of one of our hotel rooms and falling asleep in the bathtub because I needed more sleep,” Aaron Carter once told author Andy Symonds over their three years of interviews. “My mom broke down the door, afraid I was drowning in there.”
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Those hours of conversations with Symonds were to result in a memoir about Carter’s life, a life which ended too soon as he was found dead in his home on the morning of Nov. 5. The 34-year-old’s body was found in the bathtub.
“Aaron was an open book during the writing process,” Symonds said in a statement. “It’s a tragic irony that his autobiography will never include all his stories, thoughts, hopes, and dreams as he intended.” While incomplete, the memoir, titled (My Father’s Son), Aaron Carter: An Incomplete Story of an Incomplete Life, will be released on Nov. 15. It will detail the pressures that fame put on the child star, his troubled relationship with his older brother, Nick Carter, his battle with addiction and his struggle with mental health.
“I was always suicidal, especially through those years. I never attempted suicide but never had anyone to talk to about it,” Carter told Symonds. “But I knew I loved life too much to actually do it. Hopefully, I won’t do it. Having lost my own family, I want to have my own. That’s the best feeling.”
Against a bleak backdrop of lows in the artist’s life, the book will also reflect on the good. Carter referred to his brother, however strained their relationship, as his “hero from about the time I could walk. He was eight years older than me, and aside from all the standard, cool big brother stuff, he also just happened to be in the biggest boy band in the world, doing exactly what I wanted to do. And he was happy to take me under his wing from early on.”
A preview, shared by publisher Ballast Books, also reveals a story of a night spent at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. Carter detailed waking up to find the late singer “crouched at the end of his bed in his underwear, apparently sleepwalking.”
The excerpt reads: “What the fuck!?’ I shouted and shook him a little to wake him. ‘Go back to your bed! He looked startled like he was surprised to be there. He just mumbled, ‘Okay,’ then got back into his bed, and we both went back to sleep. I never asked him about it, and we never mentioned it. When I woke up in the morning, he was gone from the room.”
The unfinished memoir will include notes in the manuscript, hinting at where the book, and potentially where the late artist himself, was headed.
Photo by Gabe Ginsberg/Getty Images
