Sam Neill is a wonderful actor who has appeared in television and films such as The Hunt for Red October, In the Mouth of Madness, The Piano, Event Horizon and, of course, Jurassic Park, a movie based on a novel by Michael Crichton. It was through reading this novel and being reminded of the phenomenal movie that led me on the path to finding out he penned a memoir.

Memoirs, like all novels, are tricky things. What are you trying to say? Anybody can put words together to form sentences, and sentences together to form paragraphs, and so on. I’m doing it right now. But stories are more than words stitched together — there’s generally an intended purpose behind them.

Not all novels have a deeper meaning, however. Some are there just for entertainment purposes. I feel like memoirs more often than not fall under this heading. Some have a fine point, and others are just here to entertain. Did I Ever Tell You This? is the latter.

Sam Neill has lead a well-traveled life. Growing up in New Zealand with a stutter and a penchant for exploration, he is depicted as a working man’s man, doing various hard labor jobs under the watchful eye of his military father. It’s only later in life that he falls into acting seemingly by mistake and finds out that he enjoys it.

From that point on, the novel jumps around, telling stories of how he slowly came up in Hollywood, learning the ropes while rubbing elbows with the likes of Meryl Streep and Sean Connery, smoking a lot of grass, and feeling like a fish out of water.

The memoir doesn’t get into a lot of interesting behind-the-scenes details about Hollywood — this isn’t an exposé on the seedier side of Tinsel Town. Sam tells you who he did and didn’t like working with and why throughout his career. However, a vast majority of this novel are stories from the set and, mainly, through his life that he found interesting enough to include. Oddly enough, a lot of them have to do with bowel movements.

From being locked outside his house after taking laxatives for his upcoming colonoscopy appointment right when nature calls to a story about his great-aunt’s cremated remains being baked into a cake, this memoir reads more like a stream of consciousness rather than a planned work. Again, it’s entertaining, but lacking deeper substance.

When you find out that the main motivation for Sam to complete his memoir was the fact that he had been diagnosed with cancer, it becomes all the more telling. What could have been something that perhaps inspired people to grab the bull by the horns and truly live life is just a collection of random moments and stories that the author enjoyed.

I suppose one could take that as the deeper meaning: Sam being on his deathbed and these are the things he felt most attached to in life — stories about family and friends that made him laugh, cry and love life a little bit more — but none of that came through.

By the end of it, I just shrugged my shoulders remembering that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I think that may apply in this case.