Like meeting an old friend

Baggage: Tales from a fully packed life By Alan Cumming, Allen & Unwin, $32.99 .. .. .. .. ..

.. Alan Cumming has done so much with his talent — acting, singing, performing and writing.

This latest memoir — really a chat with this lovely man — follows Not My Father's Son ,an award-winning autobiography. That covered his awful childhood in Scotland with a sadistic father who beat and abused him psychologically.

This follow-up covers the young adult years, the performances and the friendships. There's plenty of name dropping and juicy gossip. It hops around the years, a little rambling, a lively conversation with this chatty, open, hilarious raconteur.

He married — a woman, actor Hilary Lyon — but he talks at length about the conflict of this marriage where she wanted children and he is still tormented by his brutal childhood, and his sexuality. Now he's happily married, to a man, and still friends with every one of his many liaisons.

Cumming has been on our screens and stages for years — The Good Wife, most recently Instinct with an American accent.

He's brutally honest about his failings and failures, his drug use, infidelities, professional disasters.

But it's his joyful writing that makes this a delicious book. It's like settling down on the couch with an old friend and catching up on what they've been up to. And that's plenty.