Star Trek’s Brent Spiner Is Writing a Fictionalized Memoir

In June 2020, Star Trek star Patrick Stewart announced he’s writing his memoir. Not to be outdone, Stewart’s friend and Star Trek co-star Brent Spiner has announced his own memoir, but with a twist. Spiner’s story will be fictionalized as a noir thriller based on his life. The book’s title is Fan Fiction: A Mem-Noir: Inspired by True Events, and the cover, designed by Rob Grom, includes an abstract version of Spiner’s iconic android Star Trek character, Data, whom he played through seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, four movies, and gave a final sendoff in the first season of Star Trek: Picard.

“It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but it’s primarily fiction,” Spiner tells Syfy Wire of the book. “There are slices of my own life in it, and then there are also people I have known… it’s a mashup: It’s a thriller, it’s a comedy, it’s a dark comedy. And it’s partially a memoir, but none of it’s real, really, even though a lot of things actually happened.”

Spiner tells Syfy Wire he had been asked to write his true-to-life memoirs but didn’t find the idea very interesting. Thus, the fictionalized approach. “I thought, maybe I can write something else, because I have a story I’d like to tell. Maybe I can combine the two and do a sort of hybrid,” he says. Spiner told Bored to Death creator Jonathan Ames about the idea and, loving it, Ames put Spiner in touch with writer Jeane Darst, who collaborated with Spiner to write the book.

Spiner does include some of his Next Generation co-stars in the book, including Stewart and LeVar Burton. He cautions that those scenes are detached from the reality of working with the stars.

“They’re not serious versions of themselves,” Spiner explains. “They’re a more heightened version of themselves, just like it’s a heightened version of me.

At the heart of the story is the idea of fandom and how it binds us all together. “I know I’m a fan, and I have never met an actor who’s not a fan of somebody,” he says. “And I think in a lot of ways most of us [actors] have gotten into this business, just so we can meet people and work with them because they’re who made us want to do what we do.”

Fan Fiction: A Mem-Noir: Inspired by True Events goes on sale on October 5th. Pre-orders are live now on Amazon.

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