Talk to Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Total Recall covers three separate American careers in a single life: Arnold Schwarzenegger became the greatest bodybuilder in the world before age 25, became the highest-paid movie star in the world before age 40, and became Governor of California for two terms in his fifties. The memoir is his account of how all three happened, told in a voice that is relentlessly enthusiastic and largely without false modesty. Whether you find that quality appealing or irritating will shape your experience of the book considerably.
The early chapters on Austria and bodybuilding are the strongest. Schwarzenegger grew up in a small village in Styria under a strict, physically cold father; he describes the decision to become a bodybuilder as the first moment he chose his own identity rather than the one his circumstances provided. He was training fanatically by fourteen, had won regional titles by seventeen, and arrived in London and then California before he was twenty. His account of the bodybuilding subculture of the 1960s and 1970s — the Gold's Gym community in Venice Beach, the specific training philosophy behind his physique, his relationship with Joe Weider and with rivals like Lou Ferrigno and Franco Columbu — is the most specific and detailed section of the book.
What it gets right
- 1.
Schwarzenegger's approach to bodybuilding was as psychological as physical: he believed that visualizing the exact physique he wanted in detail was a prerequisite for achieving it, and he trained his mental focus as deliberately as his muscles.
- 2.
Reinvention at scale requires ignoring the people who tell you that your current identity disqualifies you from the next one. Almost every transition Schwarzenegger made — from bodybuilding to film, from film to politics — was predicted to fail by people with plausible reasons.
- 3.
Immigrant ambition, in Schwarzenegger's telling, has a specific quality: coming from outside the system makes the system's rules feel negotiable rather than fixed. He benefited from not having absorbed the assumptions of people who had grown up with access.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Arnold Schwarzenegger was born in Thal, Styria, Austria, in 1947 and emigrated to the United States in 1968. He won the Mr. Universe title at age 20 and the Mr. Olympia title seven times. His film career spans more than forty years, with notable roles in the Terminator franchise, Predator, Total Recall, and True Lies. He served as the 38th Governor of California from 2003 to 2011. He is the author of multiple fitness books and, with coauthor Peter Petre, Total Recall. He lives in Los Angeles and has continued to be publicly active on environmental policy and democratic norms.
