WHAT DO YOU need to be able to take your life, warts and all, and explain it from its awkward bullied beginning until today, to a total stranger in a way which makes them laugh and cry and get something out of it? A combination of self-love and objectivity, arrogance and fierce ambition, skill and courage and of course the chutzpah to daydream blithely in the face of your haters. Even – or especially – if those haters have pedigrees of hurting you that reach all the way from your years as a maladjusted and ‘different’ toddler. This is what Costa Carastavrakis has done in his autobiography, I am Costa.

Exploding into popular theatre and stand-up conventions last year, Carastavrakis takes his own life story, unabashedly and critically Greek and unashamedly in the first person, and creates of it a mix of a self-help narrative, an account of addiction across the boards and a success story that doesn’t allow itself to hide behind platitudinous smugness. Because in the face of everything, all his successes and failures, he’s still vulnerable. As we all are.

Evocative of the currently fashionable and gloriously polished autobiographies of funny professionals of the ilk of Randy Rainbow’s Playing with Myself (2022), Miriam Margolyes’s This much is true (2021) and Sarah Millican’s How to be champion (2017), I am Costa is bold and brash but, like the shtick he’s developed on stage, it ultimately paints a picture of a person that you fall in love with, for his sheer humanity. And that has as much to do with his choreography with success – a couple steps back and a couple steps forward – as it does with his beautiful sense of self-deprecation, which rather than making you cringe, makes you grin with recognition. It’s also about the drugs and a candid understanding of what they did – and didn’t do – to his self-esteem. Starting with being noteworthy as the only child in his Johannesburg primary school class blessed with a very long name and a particular type of food in his lunch tin, Costa takes you through a whole range of gateways to bring him to the full-bodied, fit and focused person he is today. Sexual identity loud and proud.

It’s a lovely book. Literature in the earnest sense, it isn’t, but that’s not what it is about. Self-aggrandising, of course, to the hilt, and with many chapters that are predictable in their focus and trajectory, you know by the cover where this story goes, but that too, is not the point. The point is what you take away from it. And that’s a whole lot of warm jubbly feelings in your own heart and belly.

• I am Costa: From Meth to marathons by Costa Carastavrakis is published by Bookstorm, Johannesburg (2019). It is available through Takealot