With the help of co-author Mark Bego, Micky Dolenz originally told his tale of maintaining his composure through some very crazed times in his 1993 autobiography I'm a Believer My Life of Monkees, Music, and Madness. Along the way he shared tales of his child-star childhood, watching Mike Nesmith put his fist through a wall while fighting to secure The Monkees' artistic freedom, and the group's combative 1986 reunion, often told in screenplay format, quirkily enough.
Micky does start to lose it eventually, but this doesn't seem to happen until after the Monkees project wrapped in 1970, and since he boils the next 23 years down to fifteen pages, I'm a Believer never becomes too much of a downer despite the divorce, the drinking, the drugs, and what he describes as a sort of drunken, passive suicide attempt.
A lot of Monkee business has gone down since 1993, such as recording two reunion albums with his old group and seeing every other member of that group pass along to the great groovy pad in the sky. If Micky Dolenz in 1993 was a pretty different Micky Dolenz from the 1967 one, just imagine how all that he has experienced in the last three decades has shaped Micky Dolenz in 2026.
Well, we don't really get to find out from the latest updated edition of I'm a Believer. Mark Bego first revisited the book for a nine-page, third-person addendum in 2004. Although it was good that there was some effort to bring Micky's story up to date, the fact that the voice had shifted from the main character to what read like the kind of pacy, sunny litany of career highlights and CD reissues one would expect from a press release was disappointing. For the book's third printing, and a new nineteen page game of catch-up, Bego slows down a bit, touches on some weightier matters, and includes a few quotes from Micky, but it still would have been a lot nicer to hear about these tumultuous past twenty-two years straight from the Monkee's mouth.
