Book Excerpt: Macaulay Culkin's 'Junior'

March 13, 2006 — -- Former child star Macaulay Culkin became famous when he starred in the comedy "Home Alone" 16 years ago.

Culkin is now the author of a new book called "Junior, or Oscar De La Mancha, The Wembling Warrior, and the People I Like the Least. Not A Novel. A written project from the normal, well adjusted and 'No I don't have issues with my father!' mind of … junior (meaning me)."

The book is a collection of vignettes, stream-of-consciousness snippets, and cartoons about a child star who abandoned show business at the height of his career, much like the author.

Culkin made a concerted effort to disassociate himself from the book, in anticipation of the literary community "not exactly embracing me," he said. "I'm just some punk kid who's writing a book."

The book, written in no particular order with no particular structure, grapples with fame and Culkin's relationship with his father.

"This is so surreal for me, this whole thing, it's the most intimidating thing I have ever done to kind of just throw it all out there," said Culkin, who said he had not spoken to his father in 11 years. "This book is really just a series of moments in my life."

"I felt like I had two fathers. I had my real father and the father in my head," he said. "I think a lot of it was coming to terms with my father in my head. … I feel like I am in a good place when it comes to that."

After all the drama and trauma and the tabloid headlines about his family's problems, Culkin, 25, said he felt like he was in a good place.

"I am a very happy person," he said. "I think I have a very good simple life, and I wouldn't change anything."

THE INTRODUCTION.

NowHere Near Nowhere.

I want to make one thing clear before we begin: I am not a writer. I couldn't possibly be a writer. I have written and rewritten the words "Introduction" or "The Introduction" so many times in the past couple of years that I'm convinced I was not born to do this. Writing could not be my calling after the mess I've made of all this. This has taken way too long. The whole process of writing this book was so agonizing and ate away at so much of my time that there's no way I can't finish now. But at this rate I never will. It took me ten minutes to write this very sentence. I'm no writer. This is not my calling.

Why is it so difficult now? This used to be a comforting thing. Writing this book was fun. It made me feel better. I'm not comfortable right now. I've never felt comfortable explaining the way that I am. This (the newest in a long line of introductions) is already a failure and I've barely begun. Here I am, only on the second paragraph, and I already feel like I'm blowing it.

It's just that in the past year I have gotten way too many people involved in this project -- agents, publishers and so forth that I feel I've been disappointing with my lack of results. I'm just ready to let this go. I'm just ready to give up and say this is it and nothing more. You can have it because I have nothing left.

Not in any kind of painful way, but it's hard for me to talk about this project. It's just that I don't know what it is anymore. I could just be imagining this, but people see this book in different ways. I could show this book to ten different people and have them form very different opinions of what it is and what it means to them. Sometimes I feel like I have a dozen different people inside of me. I've always been that way and I've always written stuff down. But this is different, this is the introduction of my book. I can't just wing it.

My real problem is that after a while I decided to save this introduction for last. I figured that one of the reasons this intro was so hard to write was because I needed the book and all its parts to be in place before trying to sum it all up. And to be quite honest with you, most of the material in this book is foreign to me now.