Shortly after his 18th season with the Green Bay Packers ended with an uncharacteristic thud, Aaron Rodgers, the Super Bowl winner and future Hall of Fame quarterback, announced that he would be spending four days and four nights isolating himself at an Oregon “darkness retreat”—a cave, basically—during which he would contemplate his future. The Packers wanted to move on, start over, and Rodgers, now 39, needed to decide if he did too, or if it was time to retire. After nearly 100 hours with zero natural light, Rodgers emerged back into society with an answer: He would play for at least one more season, and he would do it for the New York Jets.

What the hell happened to him down there?

As a long-suffering Jets fan, trust me when I say that rooting for the Jets is like rooting for the Mets, but even sadder and less rewarding. The Jets haven’t won a Super Bowl—haven’t been to the Super Bowl—since 1969, and haven’t even reached the playoffs since 2010. Since then, the franchise’s highest-profile moments have been the time ex-Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez fumbled the ball after slipping and colliding into his own lineman’s rear end (the fabled “Butt Fumble”) and the time another ex-Jets quarterback, Geno Smith, got sucker-punched in the locker room by a teammate, who broke his jaw. Not since Joe Namath in the late 1960s have the Jets had a player whom anyone would describe as “electrifying.” The joke around football is that our team name is really an acronym, that “JETS” stands for “Just End The Season,” and that the only real mystery in a Jets season is how early we start deploying that motto. We’re not just lousy. We’re dull.

We even tried this strategy before—embracing a legendary Packers QB after the Packers no longer wanted him—in 2008, with Brett Favre, who wound up throwing as many interceptions (22) as touchdowns and humiliated the team by sending lewd photos and text messages to a female NFL reporter, prompting a league investigation that, of course, this being the NFL, resulted in no suspension and a $50,000 fine. He tore his bicep 11 games into his only season in New York, and that was the end of the Jets’ Brett Favre era. In hindsight, we were a perfect match.

Surely Aaron Rodgers has heard about us. Surely he understands what he’s attaching his name to. The Jets front office surrendered significant draft capital to get him—the Jets’ first- and second-round picks in this past week’s draft, and their second-round pick in 2024, which becomes their first-round pick if Rodgers plays 65 percent of the Jets’ offensive snaps this season, or roughly 12 out of 17 games. That’s a lot for a guy who might play only one more season. And yet, in spite of the fact that he will turn 40 in December, and had the worst season of his career last year, and may have lost his passion for the game, and might only be playing because he’s owed $50 million this season and almost $60 million the next as long as he plays for someone, he will nevertheless be the most gifted football player ever to put on a Jets uniform, and far and away our best quarterback, even now, even at his advanced age. Which is why you won’t find a single halfway reasonable Jets fan who is anything less than ecstatic about Rodgers’s arrival, even though we know, with decades of evidence to back us up, that this is bound to end very badly.

I don’t care! Rodgers is bringing a measure of credibility to a franchise known for butt-fumbling it away. At a press conference announcing the decision, Rodgers said all the right things. He wore No. 12 with Green Bay, but he’ll wear No. 8 with the Jets—his number in college at Cal—because 12 is the one number you can’t wear on the Jets. “Twelve,” Rodgers acknowledged, “is Broadway Joe.” In another nod to Namath, he said the Jets’ sole Lombardi trophy, from Super Bowl III, “looks a little lonely.”

Rodgers is funny, smart, and charismatic on camera—three things the Jets haven’t had since Rex Ryan was head coach and his foot fetish got bigger tabloid headlines than his football team. Rodgers guest-hosted Jeopardy for a stretch in 2021 and very much wanted the full-time job. He dates movie stars and goes on ayahuasca journeys. Forget about wins and losses. Rodgers makes the Jets infinitely more interesting just by walking in the door.

He’s also—let’s be blunt—a super weird fit. Jets fans are not exactly a Jeopardy crowd. We do not appreciate being told to rephrase things as a question. We’ve always been the down-market team in New York relative to the Giants, the Mets to their Yankees, the Islanders to their Rangers, with a salty blue-collar fan base that takes pride in being uncouth and that Timothée Chalamet, of all people, somehow managed to nail on Saturday Night Live. The exit rotundas at the old Meadowlands Stadium were a drunken hellscape. Some of our more imaginative ogres used to drop quarters from the top of the spiral footpath down onto the grassy center, then wait for a kid to come grab it and dump beer on him from above. J! E! T! S! Jets! Jets! Jets! Don’t even get me started on Fireman Ed.

At the press conference, reporters took turns gently probing Rodgers on whether he understood what he was getting himself into, and many of his answers could be paraphrased as yes, I’m aware. He insisted that his fling with the Jets wasn’t “a one-and-done in my mind. This is a commitment.” We’ll see about that.

And yet if we remove those Gang Green–tinted glasses, the ones that give everything a vague hue of vomit, it’s not hard to see why Rodgers believes, or at least says he believes, that the Jets can win a Super Bowl. The team went 7–10 last season, but it was a frisky 7–10, lots of close games, and the roster was young, well coached, and loaded with talent, especially at wide receiver. In a rare sweep, a pair of Jets—wide receiver Garrett Wilson and cornerback Sauce Gardner—wound up winning the NFL’s offensive and defensive rookie of the year awards. The team’s winning percentage hovered around .500 all season, despite the worst quarterbacking in the league, and it played semi-meaningful games into December. “Just End The Season” didn’t get deployed until the season ended. Jets fans actually enjoyed watching this team, not because they were good, per se, but because they were promising—and when you’re a Jets fan, promising is as good as it gets.

The Rodgers trade had been gestating for weeks, and I was beginning to wonder if this would wind up as another Jetsy chapter in our franchise history—that time we actually thought we were going to get Aaron Rodgers. Instead, shortly after news of the trade broke, the Jets’ Vegas odds of winning the Super Bowl shot up to sixth-highest in the league. Suddenly, four words that have never been associated with the Jets started getting thrown around on sports-talk shows: fashionable Super Bowl pick. The Jets! Do you know how long we’ve waited just to be a fashionable Super Bowl pick? This is already our best season in years, and it hasn’t begun yet.

In 2021, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, one of the few NFL franchises as bungling as ours, won the Super Bowl after Tom Brady ditched Bill Belichick and the Patriots to play for them, so there is some recent precedent here. Brady has also obliterated notions of how long a quarterback can perform at an elite level. He led the NFL in passing yardage at 43. He makes Rodgers look like a puppy. During a game last season against the Bills, on October 30—outdoors, in Buffalo—I watched with astonishment as Rodgers flicked a pass 70 yards downfield, right on target, like it was nothing, before one of his lousy receivers dropped it. His arm, at least, is as golden as ever.

Rodgers isn’t Brady, but he’s awfully close, and he’s always been the more physically gifted of the two. Few quarterbacks have ever played at a higher level. So if Brady can win a ring with the Bucs, why can’t A-Rodg do it with the Jets?

Even if Rodgers is washed up, relative to peak Rodgers, every Jets fan in creation would still choose him over what we rolled out last season: a three-man rotation consisting of a genuinely washed-up former Super Bowl winner (Joe Flacco), an undrafted career backup who pulled off a few plucky wins (Mike White), and the worst starting quarterback in the NFL last season by nearly every statistical metric, Zach Wilson. Going from Zach Wilson to Aaron Rodgers is like going from a potato to Aaron Rodgers. We just need a seasoned pilot. Merely good would be a quantum leap.

Rodgers is a student of history (Jeopardy), so he’s perhaps already calculated that even if things do go off the rails with the Jets, the world will forget that this peculiar union ever happened, just like people have probably already forgotten that Favre once played for the Jets, or that Michael Jordan played a few years for the Washington Wizards. And those who do remember will blame us, not him. We have no idea how this will go. We know exactly how this will go. Just start the season.

*Source Images: David Eulitt / Getty; Elsa / Getty; Grant Halverson / Getty; Stacy Revere / Getty  

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When Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, hit the best-seller lists in January, the press spent several breathless days teasing out every revelation in the book. It went on to sell an astonishing 3.2 million copies in its first week on the shelves. Although Spare achieved what a celebrity memoir sets out to do—and although I enjoyed reading about Prince William pushing Harry into a dog bowl as much as anyone else did—it is not, in my opinion, one of the best ever published. It’s not even the best one ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer; that would be Open, his genre-expanding collaboration with the tennis great Andre Agassi.

For a well-known person—especially a relatively young one—writing an autobiography is a tricky business, and few stars nail it, even if they do have help from (credited or uncredited) co-writers. What makes a tell-all worth picking up is not just the confessions and recriminations inside; it’s the sense that the celebrity has an honest, grounded perspective on their own life. Harry, like many other A-listers who attempt to document their stories on the page, seems to still be working on that perspective.

The following titles, however, pass the test: They are revealing and also have compelling narrative arcs. There is gossip, but it never seems gratuitous. And, crucially, whether a co-writer was involved or not, each feels like it’s told in the author’s own voice.

Dey Street

Open Book, by Jessica Simpson

Simpson’s memoir hit The New York Times’ best-seller list when it was published in 2020, and for good reason: It is crushingly honest and extremely funny. Readers will find that despite the fact that Simpson worked with a co-writer (the famed Kevin Carr O’Leary), every word sounds so Jessica, whether she is writing about her “glittercup” (in which she hid 7 a.m. vodka sodas during the depths of her alcoholism), her tortured romance with John Mayer, or her ever-evolving relationship with Jesus. Even people who have mostly forgotten Simpson’s reality-television show Newlyweds or her pop-music career will enjoy the general 2000s nostalgia: MTV red carpets, boy bands, endless crop tops. But Simpson’s real feat is describing the height of her fame in such vivid (and sometimes disturbing) detail that readers are forced to consider how the public treated young performers at the time— and, especially, how they treated her.

[Read: Don’t judge ]I’m Glad My Mom Died by its title

Grand Central Publishing

Find Me, by Rosie O’Donnell

This book does not trace the entirety of the talk-show host’s life or delve into the highs and lows of her career. Instead, O’Donnell shares a particular bizarre and almost unbelievable story from her life—one that I haven’t stopped thinking about since I read Find Me in a book club three years ago. (Everyone in the club was similarly stunned.) O’Donnell tells the reader about Stacie, a 14-year-old pregnant girl who called the hotline of the adoption nonprofit O’Donnell worked with and turned O’Donnell’s life upside down. “A lot of it won’t make sense, at least logically,” O’Donnell admits in the beginning. “The events that follow, some dark and painful, changed me absolutely. You have been warned.” She sets up her tale almost like it’s a thriller, weaving in moments from her own childhood—and there is, as you might imagine, an impossible-to-predict twist. The story is gripping because of how O’Donnell responds to this unique situation, and how much of herself—the good, the bad, the embarrassing—she chooses to share with readers in the process.

St. Martin’s Griffin

The Meaning of Mariah Carey, by Mariah Carey

The joy of Carey’s long-awaited memoir is in the details: In every story, she remembers exactly what she was wearing, how she styled her hair, which rapper or baseball player looked at her from across the room and how. She also never forgets a grudge—poor Jennifer Lopez is referred to as “another female entertainer … whom I don’t know,” echoing a much-memed early-2000s interview where Carey, when asked about J. Lo, said, “I don’t know her.” But the book, co-written with Michaela Angela Davis, goes far beyond Carey’s pithy observations; it covers her turbulent childhood, her scary-sounding first marriage to the music executive Tommy Mottola, and her subsequent mental-health struggles. When expounding on these moments in her life, she is surprisingly vulnerable and rarely defensive. But she always finds time for jokes and, thankfully, some lighthearted romance: The bits on her short-lived but fairy-tale-esque relationship with Derek Jeter are particularly satisfying.

[Read: What is it about Pamela Anderson?]

Gallery Books

Taste: My Life Through Food, by Stanley Tucci

In writing a memoir, stars sometimes find it helpful to organize their life story around a theme. Tucci does this in Taste, about his decades-long obsession with cooking and dining. He begins by recounting his Italian American upbringing in Westchester, New York, then continues by narrating his gastronomic adventures abroad. All of this is juxtaposed with approachable recipes for beloved family classics such as his grandmother’s tomato sauce. Tucci writes like an affable tour guide without employing the false modesty seen in many other celebrity memoirs. He is not afraid to name-drop and does so often, writing about the time he sampled disgusting sausage with Meryl Streep on a press tour in France and the occasion at which he met his wife, Felicity Blunt: her sister Emily Blunt’s wedding to John Krasinski, which, he deadpans, “took place in Lake Como at a gorgeous home owned by a friend of the affianced couple whose name rhymes with George Clooney.” The result is an inside look at the often charmed life of a successful working actor that doesn’t come off as insincere or unapproachable. Fans of Tucci’s Instagram cooking videos will feel like they are reading a note from a friend.

Harper

Inside Out, by Demi Moore

When Moore published Inside Out, in 2019, which chronicled, among many other things, her divorce from Ashton Kutcher, Kutcher posted a suspiciously timed tweet that referenced his new wife. Perhaps he was embarrassed: Moore claims that while they were together, Kutcher’s attitude toward her sobriety encouraged her to start drinking again after nearly 20 years, and that he cheated on her multiple times. But the Kutcher material is just one part of this surprising, affecting autobiography. Co-written with The New Yorker’s Ariel Levy—who published her own very good memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, in 2017—Inside Out traces Moore’s devastating, chaotic childhood; her marriage to Bruce Willis; her painful miscarriage at age 42; and the confluence of events around her 50th birthday that ultimately led her to get professional help. The writing is spare, straightforward, and unforgettable.

[Read: The best books for a broken heart]

Crown

Greenlights, by Matthew McConaughey

This book was—if McConaughey is to be believed—written by McConaughey in just 52 days alone in a desert cabin with no electricity. The actor says that he drew from 35 years of his diaries to compile a record of “the first fifty years of my life, of my résumé so far on the way to my eulogy.” The focus is on his rough-and-tumble childhood in Texas and his relationship with his wife, Camila Alves McConaughey, and their children (including a thorough description of the “wet dream”—yep—that convinced him that he was on the path to becoming a father). The highlight of the text, however, is McConaughey’s liberal use of aphorisms. Some he wrote, and some he stole; many of them are handwritten and reproduced as such on the pages. He calls them “bumperstickers,” and they all sound a bit like this one: “Truth’s like a jalapeño, the closer to the root the hotter it gets.” Like the book itself, they are delightful, a little silly, and revealing in their own way. In the process of detailing McConaughey’s rules for “l-i-v-i-n,” Greenlights provides an idiosyncratic window into his mind.

Dey Street

We’re Going to Need More Wine, by Gabrielle Union

Simpson and Union collaborated with the same writer, but the two books sound completely different: Here, the voice and humor are all Union. She covers considerable ground in a small amount of space, recounting her (less-than-ideal) time guest-starring on Friends; her budding relationship with her now-husband, Dwyane Wade; and the time she got a yeast infection and tried to treat it with yogurt (“Warning: Famous Vaginas Get Itchy, Too”). My favorite essay, “Crash-and-Burn Marriage,” is about her ill-fated marriage to her first husband, the former NFL player Chris Howard. Rarely has a celebrity been so frank about a personal mistake: Union recalls walking down the aisle crying because she knew the partnership was doomed (she says that both parties were cheating), and she confesses to showering Howard with gifts out of guilt when they divorced. This candor makes the actor seem less like an untouchable star than a real person with real problems, which only endears her to readers more. Her 2021 follow-up, You Got Anything Stronger?, is next on my list.

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