Bookends: Arkansas tales

Stranger men have become stars than Billy Bob Thornton, but not many. His obsessive-compulsive disorder encompasses a bizarre list of phobias: of clowns, of old furniture, of Benjamin Disraeli’s hair.

Brutally dyslexic, he won an Oscar for his screenplay for Sling Blade, but writing a memoir, he says, would be beyond him. So, in an intriguing act of creative symbiosis, his friend Kinky Friedman, the Jewish country- singer and novelist, has taped him talking to friends late at night and turned these rambles into a book.

The Billy Bob Tapes (Virgin, £18.99) has many of the flaws of ordinary ghosted showbiz memoirs. But Thornton has wonderful stories to tell, particularly about his childhood in Arkansas — don’t even mention the word ‘redneck’ — and the years of apparently doomed striving before his career took off.

As you’d expect from his screen performances, he is laconic, foul-mouthed, often hilariously funny, but palpably, painfully vulnerable, whose coping mechanisms may seem weird but clearly work for him, just about.