The Royal We : A Memoir

Books of the Year 2025: #10

A founding member of the iconic band Faith No More shares his coming-of-age and out of-the-closet story in pre-tech boom San Francisco.

The Royal We is a poetic survey of a time set in a magical city that once was and is no more. It is a memoir written by Roddy Bottum, a musician and artist, that documents through prose his coming of age and out of the closet in 1980s San Francisco, a charged era of bicycle messengers, punk rock, street witches, wheatgrass, and rebellion. The book follows his travels from Los Angeles, growing up gay with no role models, to San Francisco, where he formed Faith No More and went on to tour the world relentlessly, surviving heroin addiction and the plight of AIDS, to become a queer icon.

The book is an elevated wallop of tongue and insight, much more than a tell-all. There are personal tales of historical pinnacles like Kurt and Courtney, Guns N’ Roses, and recaps of gold records and arena rock—but it’s the testimonies of tragedy and addiction and preposterous life-spins that make this work so unique and intriguing. Bottum writes about his dark and harrowing past in a clear-eyed voice that is utterly devoid of self-pity, and his emboldened and confident pronouncements of achievement and unorthodox heroism flow in an unstoppable train that’s both captivating and inspirational.

A remarkable portrayal of a creative individual in emergence, a gay man figuring out how to be a gay man, and a detailed look at the nuance of 1980s pre-tech boom San Francisco, The Royal We will be greatly appreciated by people who loved Kathleen Hanna’s Rebel Girl, Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Hua Hsu’s Stay True, and other memoirs about the artist’s life.

“A very honest and extremely well-articulated story of coming of age, parallel and within the evolution of the alternative music world. Roddy Bottum comes into his sexuality in a homophobic music scene, creating a stunning landscape of alienation and drug use that he manages to lift himself out of. There’s an exuberance to the telling of his adventure that guides the reader along through the darkest of moments.” Kim Gordon, author of Girl in a Band

“Roddy Bottum’s The Royal We doesn’t just offer an important portrait of an era, scene, and sound—it also gives voice to a sensibility all Bottum’s own, along with offering a startling cri de coeur about loss and death. It’s a pounding example of what it sounds like to be ‘alive not dead,’ and we are the luckier for it.” Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts