In the lavish halls of his Beverly Hills mansion, Lionel Richie watched with a profound sense of awe as a video played on his manager’s phone. It showed countless copies of his memoir, “Truly,” being whisked down a conveyor belt at a Virginia printing plant.
With a slow shake of his head and a hand clasped over his mouth, he looked as if he was witnessing a new birth.
Surrounding him were opulent sitting rooms, each featuring a grand piano. One room’s shelves were stacked high with awards that nearly touched the ceiling, while another proudly displayed a meticulously tooled leather guest book bearing the signatures of celebrated friends like Pharrell Williams, Sidney Poitier, Jackie Chan, and Gregory Peck.
Despite a demanding European tour just concluded and another in South America on the horizon—despite selling over 100 million albums, mentoring on “American Idol,” and playing to “oceanic” stadium crowds for five decades—Richie found himself utterly speechless before his own life story.
“This is not a book about who I met and who I knew,” he explained, his voice full of reflection as he strode into yet another elegant room in his vibrant orange sneakers. “It was about fear. Can you overcome your worst fears and move forward?”
A striking photograph taken at his California home shows Lionel Richie, a figure who has sold over 100 million albums worldwide. This book marks his first foray into authorship.
Navigating Life’s ‘Twice as Tough’ Challenges
Meeting Richie in person confirms his on-screen charisma: he’s dynamic, charming, and carries a septuagenarian’s wisdom, readily sharing adages and life lessons. Upon noticing my own experience with an empty nest, he thoughtfully presented me with a perfectly folded tissue, offering, “Let me help you, darling.” He gestured to the three rings around his neck, symbols of his children, adding, “From now on, you’ll know whether they got it.”
He spoke of the deep appreciation he holds for family, enduring connections, the balance of roots and wings, and the monumental effort involved in raising children. His sincerity is genuine, never veering into sentimentality, a true hallmark of his artistry.
His memoir, “Truly,” is a substantial 463-page journey packed with childhood recollections, fascinating music industry tales, and 25 pages of personal photographs.
It traces Richie’s path from his early days in Tuskegee, Alabama, where he once envisioned a future as an Episcopal priest, through his saxophone-playing and singing years with The Commodores (including a summer spent sleeping under a table in Harlem), to his explosive success as a solo artist with hits like “Hello” and “Stuck On You,” and the title track itself. Today, he remains a revered troubadour philosopher, celebrated for his incredible endurance in the industry.
A childhood photo captures a young Lionel Richie, just seven years old, in Tuskegee, Alabama, a testament to his upbringing with an English teacher mother and a classical pianist grandmother.
Richie’s disappearance from the public eye for nearly a decade only gets two chapters in the book, but they’re its most vulnerable and powerful. This was the period when he started to stare down insecurities he’d carried from Tuskegee to Los Angeles.
He writes about his fear that, after the Commodores, he’d never have another hit. His fear of missing out; of letting his family down; of not having a backup plan. And his struggles with stage fright, A.D.H.D. and depression.
“Truly” isn’t a sad book, but it is a candid one. And Richie is refreshingly frank on the subject of race.
Back in the day, Tuskegee was, as Richie describes it, a haven for “the best doctors, the best lawyers, the best surgeons, who just happened to be Black.”
In the book, he recalls a 1986 interview with Barbara Walters, tentatively titled “Lionel Richie, Rags to Richie” until she visited the gracious college-adjacent home that was deeded to the Richie family by heirs of Booker T. Washington. (Richie’s grandparents were also friends with George Washington Carver.)
Before turning to music, Richie thought he might become an Episcopal priest, a path he ultimately chose not to follow.
He writes, “We all understood that if you were Black, you had to be twice as good as the standard. You had to withstand doubt and overcome obstacles that were twice as tough.”
When Richie was 8, his father was reprimanded in the cruelest terms after his son drank from a “Whites Only” water fountain in Montgomery, Ala. Richie remembers the way his indomitable dad shrank from strangers’ wrath.
In 1963, Richie’s crush, Cynthia Diane Wesley, died at 14 in a church bombing, a hate crime that forever immortalized her as one of the “Birmingham Four.”
“I couldn’t make any sense of it,” he writes. “Not then. Not now.”
In our conversation, Richie kept coming back to the idea of fortitude: “My dad used to say, ‘Are you standing up? Or are you hiding behind the couch? What’s the similarity between a hero and a coward? They were both scared to death. One stepped forward, and one stepped back.’”
Richie writes nostalgically of his years with The Commodores. Their hits included “Three Times a Lady” and “Brick House.”
‘The Little Boy with Glasses’
Richie’s mother was an English teacher, and his grandmother a classical pianist. “He grew up in a community that was oriented toward books and intellectual life and people who put words on the page,” said Elizabeth Mitchell, Richie’s editor at HarperOne.
Still, he had some trepidation about writing a memoir. When he committed to it, he considered taking a page from Cher — going with two volumes — but his publisher and his collaborator, Mim Eichler Rivas, gently nixed the notion.
“My publishers didn’t like the idea either,” Cher said in an interview about her own writing. “But then they realized it couldn’t be one book. You wouldn’t be able to lift it.”
At first Richie and Rivas worked together for a few hours each afternoon. Then their sessions migrated to Richie’s preferred time slot, beginning around one o’clock in the morning and ending near dawn.
“I have to be there when God is available,” Richie said. “No lawyers. No managers. No agents. No press. No nothing.”
Richie told stories, and Rivas asked questions and recorded.
There were minor disagreements, as when Rivas inserted a word like “flabbergasted,” Richie said. “I’d go, ‘Mim. I’m Black.’” This was not a word he’d use.
The hardest part, Richie joked, was “admitting to myself and to the rest of the world” that he was not a jock, a standout student or even especially popular during his school days.
“He was the little boy with glasses,” said Ronald LaPread, who grew up with Richie and played bass for The Commodores. “He was kind of skinny. Very insignificant.”
Richie recalled the moment when the tide started to turn, at a talent show at Tuskegee College (now a university).
“The greatest line I ever heard, coming out of a girl’s mouth: ‘Sing it, baby!’” Richie said. “It was one of those things where, OK, I think I’m getting kind of cool. I had never been cool in my life.”
LaPread added, “Not only did we have a decent frontman, he was a hell of a songwriter. It all turned into sweet sugar.”
Tempted as Richie was to tread lightly on painful subjects, he knew he’d be wasting time if he didn’t dig into the hard stuff in his book.
He has an axiom for this too: “If you run from the lion, the lion will chase you. If you attack the lion, the lion will run away.”
In 1983, Richie embarked on his first solo tour, a pivotal moment in his career.
‘God Has Your Next Move’
Reading “Truly,” one can sense Richie’s discomfort — and his determination to be fair — as he delves into the dissolution of two marriages and The Commodores. (“I’m sure it wasn’t easy for him and it wasn’t easy for us either,” LaPread said. “All we knew was each other.”)
Richie gets his lightness back when he describes “We Are the World,” which he wrote with Michael Jackson and recorded during an all-night marathon session with a bevy of luminaries in 1985.
“‘We Are the World’ changed my life,” Richie writes. “It made me ask, if I’m in my championship season, what good can I do with it?”
The record sold 800,000 copies in three days, according to the book, and raised $80 million for famine relief in Africa.
In the aftermath, Richie felt like he was on the nose of a rocket. Everyone else in his orbit was safe inside — agents, manager, family, friends.
“This rocket was flying so fast, you didn’t know you passed through three years,” Richie said. “And you’re invincible.”
He went on, “If you walked into a room and swept everything off the table, everyone went, ‘Oh great, Lionel, we’ll clean that up.’ Are you into girls? All the girls. You into drugs? All the drugs. Ego? All the ego.”
Then Richie’s father died. His first marriage ended, publicly and painfully. His voice gave out.
“I didn’t know you can disintegrate with the rocket,” he said.
Richie had what he described as a “nervous breakdown.” In 1991, he spent five days alone in Jamaica, sitting in a beach chair and drinking Cristal as the tide crept up around him. Each night, he writes, “the hotel staff would come out, pick me up in the chair, and retrieve my empty champagne bottle, now full of saltwater, to bring me back up to dry land — waking me before I drowned.”
He went home to Tuskegee, where his 97-year-old grandmother gave him a pep talk and some no-nonsense advice: “Why don’t you get a good night’s sleep? God has your next move.”
Even for a reader who has never gone multiplatinum, embraced Nelson Mandela or performed in front of two billion people at the Olympics, these passages are, in many ways, relatable.
Though “Truly” nods to familiar names like Quincy Jones, Frank Sinatra and Muhammad Ali, Richie emphasizes, “this is not a book about who I met and who I knew.”
For Richie, that hiatus was a lifesaver.
“I will tell you that because it’s very important to know,” he said, kicking back in a white chair overlooking a verdant patio he tends himself. (Richie also gardens for his daughter Nicole Richie, whose neighbors are tickled to spot him in her yard, pruning and humming.)
Richie went to therapy. He remarried. He underwent risky voice restoration surgery and learned to sing all over again.
He stepped back into the spotlight. He’s been there ever since, alongside endurance musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Diana Ross, Billy Joel and Cher.
Cher had some advice for him on the eve of his publication day:
“You have to kind of steel yourself. You have to put a rod in your backbone,” she said. “And listen to people’s questions before you dive in to answer, to let them digest. Take your time.”
After all, Cher added, “It’s your life.”
Richie is ready.
“Every time you feel fear, step forward,” he said once again. “That’s what I keep in my mind now. Is today confusing? Yeah. Tomorrow may not be. Why? Because I faced today.”