A Thousand Stories From the Composer Behind "We Can Be Kind"

What do the song "We Can Be Kind," Disney's Beauty and the Beast, a Jewish grandmother, and a gay metaphysician have in common?

The answer is David Friedman, and his new memoir, David Friedman, Stories of My Life, is one of the most delightful books of the year.

If you don't recognize the name, you almost certainly know the work. For decades, Friedman has made people laugh, cry, and believe in kindness through his music. He is a Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award-winning composer and conductor who worked on beloved Disney films including Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. He has been in the recording studio with artists like Diana Ross, Barry Manilow, and Nancy LaMott, the celebrated cabaret singer whose albums he produced. His songs of hope, healing, and humor, like "We Can Be Kind" and "Help Is on the Way," have been sung in concert halls, cabarets, churches, and living rooms around the world. And beyond music, he has built a second career as a teacher, sharing a spiritual and psychological approach he calls The Thought Exchange with audiences across the country.

That's a lot of life, and Stories of My Life is packed with it. The book gathers the stories behind nearly a thousand moments that shaped him: tales of family, friends, and fame, joy and heartbreak, absurdity and grace, with, as the book cheerfully admits, a generous amount of gossip and laughter along the way.

The format is what makes it so much fun. Instead of a traditional autobiography that marches from birth to the present, Friedman tells his life in short, self-contained stories. Some are a paragraph long. Some are a few pages. You can read them in order, or open the book anywhere and dive in. One moment you're backstage during a disastrous rehearsal, the next you're with his Jewish grandmother, the next you're in a recording session with a legend, and the next you're sitting with him in a moment of grief or a quiet realization that changed how he saw the world.

There's a reason that approach works so well. Our memories don't actually come to us as tidy chapters. They arrive as vivid fragments: a line someone said, a room we were in, a moment that made us laugh so hard we cried. Storytellers, comedians, and great dinner guests all understand that a life is best shared one story at a time. Friedman, with a born entertainer's sense of timing, turns that instinct into a book. It's the rare memoir that works just as well on a bedside table, a coffee table, or tucked into a bag for a few stolen minutes.

Beneath the humor and the name-dropping, there's real depth. Friedman writes openly about being a gay man, about the people he loved and lost, about disappointments as well as triumphs, and about the long work of learning to live authentically and kindly. Readers who know him from his music will meet him in a new way here, and readers who don't will discover a warm, wise, and genuinely funny companion. The book is, in the end, a celebration of being human, told with the humor of a performer and the heart of a healer.

Here's the lovely side effect of reading it. Whether you read one story or a hundred, you'll finish smiling and nodding, and you'll probably start thinking about your own stories: the characters in your family, the moments that shaped you, the funny disasters you've survived. That might be Friedman's greatest gift. He reminds us that every life is full of stories worth telling.

Stories of My Life is a perfect pick for Broadway and Disney fans, music lovers, readers of LGBTQ+ memoir, and anyone looking for a big-hearted book that's easy to love and hard to put down. At 448 pages, it also makes a generous, gift-ready treasure.

David Friedman, Stories of My Life by David Friedman is available now in paperback and hardcover.