The book Last Rites solves the mystery of how a legend survived self-destruction and then had to face mortality head-on — giving readers an unvarnished insider’s lesson in resilience, regret, and what it costs to be famous.
Last Rites says: the life of a rock star is both a life of mythic highs and ordinary human costs — and reckoning with the cost (health, family, memory) is the story this memoir chooses to tell.
The book is Ozzy’s own eyewitness testimony, rich with concrete episode detail (the quad-bike coma, No More Tours II, steroid misuse, infection, spine surgeries) that is corroborated in press coverage and reviews; major outlets treated it as a candid final memoir and several reported its bestseller status on release.
Who it’s for, who it isn’t
If you’ve ever loved Black Sabbath, loud guitars, or the way a laugh can make pain bearable, you’ll love this.
If you’re caring for a parent, partner, or self while navigating MRIs, PT gyms, and insurance acronyms, you’ll recognize the landscape and pick up emotional technique.
If you want a sanitized, PR-polished victory lap, you won’t.
And if you want actionable humanity—rituals, reframes, the role of art and marriage in staying yourself—this is your book.
It also fits readers who want facts anchored in public record: Parkinson’s disclosure, end-of-touring statements, and chart-and-award context all exist outside the memoir and line up cleanly with what’s inside.
Evidence
- Rolling Stone ran a long feature summarising key revelations in the book and calling it “haunting, revelatory.”
- The Washington Post review framed the memoir as a portrait of twilight and decline, noting its emotional weight.
- The Guardian published a “10 things we learned” digest of the memoir (useful for readers wanting highlights).
- Kirkus Reviews called the memoir “rambling and disorganized” but praised its frankness and emotional center.
- The publisher and press announced Last Rites as an immediate bestseller on lists such as the New York Times and Sunday Times at release.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Last Rites — Ozzy Osbourne; Grand Central Publishing (First US Edition: October 2025); ISBNs listed in the PDF.
This is a straight memoir: part confessional health narrative, part career chronicle, part love letter and apology — all in the voice readers expect from Ozzy. The subject matter centers on Ozzy’s final decade: addiction relapse, a catastrophic string of medical crises, cancelled tours, spine surgeries, Parkinson’s-related episodes, and ultimately the effort to mount a final return for family and fans. The author’s credentials are literal — founder and frontman of Black Sabbath, a solo star whose three-decade visibility makes him a primary eye-witness to heavy metal’s cultural arc.
The central thesis is plain: this is Ozzy’s unfiltered accounting of what fame costs and how a life of addiction, accidents, and late medical decline shapes one man’s final reckoning. He writes not to justify everything he did but to explain the chain of choices — with the explicit admission that his identity and career were inseparable from those choices.
Read as a whole, Last Rites is a last word from an author who knows his audience and wants them to know him honestly.
2. Background
Ozzy’s life story is already well known: small-town Aston to Black Sabbath, solo superstardom, public disasters, reality-TV fame, and decades of headline-making behaviour.
The memoir assumes you know the major arcs — Sabbath’s early shock-rock, Randy Rhoads’s death, Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, the bat incident — and builds on those to show how the later medical traumas were both physically real and mythically resonant. Ozzy’s early sections reframe longstanding anecdotes with fresh detail and regret. The book’s chronology centers on the 2018-2025 era (No More Tours II, health collapse, surgeries, the attempt to finish a farewell tour) and he uses those events to reflect on the entire life.
He also lays bare his addiction patterns (alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, prescription drugs), plus the ways medical treatments (steroids like Decadron/dexamethasone) interacted badly with those problems. That clinical detail becomes a throughline of the narrative.
3. Last Rites Summary
Ozzy Osbourne’s Last Rites reads like a conversation with a very famous, very frail, and unmistakably candid friend. It is a memoir that pivots away from being merely a catalogue of rock ’n’ roll stunts and toward a late-life reckoning: a sequence of medical crises, the slow unspooling of physical invulnerability, and the emotional accounting that follows. The narrative opens from a startling, intimate place — Ozzy asking, plainly, when one begins to feel old — and then moves through the loud, absurd, tragic, and tender episodes that answer that question for him.
At its heart, Last Rites is organized around a few intersecting truths. First: Ozzy’s identity has always been doubled — “Ozzy,” the stage persona, and “John,” the private man — and the book tracks how those two selves have collided and compensated over decades. Second: the physical consequences of a life of excess and extreme work schedules finally catch up in ways that are medical, humbling, and irreversible.
Third: family and a tight inner circle — above all Sharon Osbourne — provide the scaffolding that turns recurrence into recovery, or at least survival. These themes reappear as the memoir walks through specific crises: the quad-bike fall, repeated spine surgeries, the cataclysmic cascade after steroid use (notably dexamethasone/Decadron), and the slow, sometimes mysterious cognitive and motor setbacks associated with Parkinsonism and age.
The book’s emotional engine is honesty. Ozzy does not stylize mistakes; he names them. He admits to the attractions of alcohol, cocaine, prescription mixtures, and to years of awake, drug-fueled mania on the road. He also names the medical decisions he regrets — particularly the dependence on high-dose steroids that suppressed immune function and set the stage for infections that nearly killed him. The passage on Decadron is brutally plain: “For as long as I can remember, the answer’s been a drug called Decadron… if you do enough Decadron, your immune system goes from suppressed to totally shut down. And that was what had happened…” That single thread explains much of the medical cascade recounted later.
Narratively, the memoir alternates between raucous tour stories and hospital-room detail. The early sections read like classic rock memoir: RV shenanigans, pyrotechnic jokes that almost get the band arrested, and the raw sorrow of losing colleagues and friends (most poignantly Randy Rhoads). Ozzy’s recollections of wild tour days — M-80s thrown from car windows, hotel pranks that should have ended in disaster — are funny, reckless, and oddly humanizing; they remind the reader that this life was not merely about spectacle, but about seeking joy and escape in extremes. Yet those same episodes accumulate into a portrait of a body repeatedly put at risk.
Then the tone shifts and the book becomes what it promises in title: a catalogue of last chances. The spine surgeries, the ICU hallucinations, the periods of immobility and the indignities of being dependent on others are described with a mixture of rage and gratitude. Ozzy details the practicalities of medical recovery: bedridden stretches, blood clots, infections, and the terrifying mismatch between public expectation (finish the farewell tour) and bodily reality. There is a heartbreaking scene where Sharon breaks the news that major spinal surgery will likely keep him from performing an eagerly anticipated show at the Commonwealth Games — the moment crystallizes his loss of agency.
A strong, recurring subject is memory and its losses. Ozzy candidly admits holes in his recall — “There are holes in my memory so big most of the eighties and nearly all of the nineties slipped through” — and the book uses that admission as a frame: not everything here is chronological or perfectly precise, but the emotional truth remains. Rather than trying to pretend omniscience, he allows lapses; this gives the book an odd authority: he only claims what he can remember and owns what he cannot. That rhetorical honesty is central to why the memoir feels trustworthy even when it’s confessional.
Two other strengths emerge consistently. One is the portrait of intimacy: Sharon appears as far more than a spouse; she is a strategic, stubborn manager of his life and health, the person who brokers medical opinions, keeps public relations honest, and organizes last-ditch comeback plans (like the “Back to the Beginning” farewell show). Ozzy’s gratitude toward Sharon runs through the book and is one of its most humane through-lines.
Second, the book’s musical reflection is sober and affectionate: Ozzy honours bandmates, remembers studio tortures (like the difficult Ozzmosis sessions), and acknowledges the mixed consequences of Black Sabbath’s fame: community, rupture, and lifelong bonds that persist even through estrangement.
The memoir is also, pragmatically, a cautionary medical text — though not written in the sterile voice of doctors. Ozzy’s description of the steroid-driven immunosuppression, the infections that followed, and the vulnerability to hospital-acquired conditions reads like a patient’s warning: aggressive performance schedules plus strong medications is a dangerous formula.
He describes specific outcomes — long hospital stays, prolonged physical therapy, and repeated need for hardware in his spine — that give a lay reader a clearer picture of what long-term complications can look like. For anyone interested in the intersection of celebrity and healthcare, those passages are stark and educational.
Critically, the book refuses two temptations. It refuses to be a vindictive tell-all — Ozzy rarely uses the book to settle petty scores — and it refuses to sanitize the past into a redemption arc that erases pain. The tone is rueful, sometimes comedic, often exasperated, and occasionally wistful. He does not look back to justify; he looks back to explain and to name errors. That stance makes Last Rites feel less like reputation management and more like legacy work. He wants to be remembered honestly.
If the book has structural flaws, they derive from the limits of memory and the memoir form. Readers who want linear chronology or dense analysis will find the episodic structure disorienting. Repetition is common — a side effect of both the subject matter (medical relapses) and the narrator’s admitted lapses. Yet those very repetitions can humanize: they mimic how trauma and recovery loop in a person’s mind. In short, the book’s imperfections map onto the person it depicts.
Two scenes that linger as emblematic: first, the quad-bike accident and subsequent surgeries that literally put “metal” into his body — the memoir calls him “an actual iron man” after his surgeries — a grimly apt image for a man whose career was full of iron riffs and heavy metaphors.
Second, the “Back to the Beginning” farewell concert planning, which displays the capacity for reinvention even at a late stage of life: the idea of a final, charitable reunion show staged by Sharon to give fans closure is not simply spectacle, it’s a moral gesture. Together they capture the tension of Ozzy’s late life: bodily fragility and public meaning-making.
On the level of style, Ozzy’s voice is a key asset. The language is plain, peppered with humor and blunt expletives; the sentences sometimes stumble into tangents like a familiar storyteller in a pub.
The voice is both protective (a defense mechanism) and revealing. When he is tender — recalling the small gestures of people now dead or the loyalty of bandmates who reappear after a fallout — the effect is real and moving. The memoir’s comic lines and absurd anecdotes (hotel pranks, backstage chaos) function as relief, but also as testimony: they’re what he remembers best and what he used to live for.
Finally, the book’s moral lesson is modest but powerful: living as a myth has a cost; the myth-maker must ultimately reckon with the ordinary facts of mortality, dependence, and memory. Ozzy’s repeated claim — that being on stage was the drug he chased his whole life — reframes decades of excess in terms of longing rather than mere self-destruction: “All along, that’s what I was chasing. It was the best drug I ever took.”
That line explains his choices without excusing them. It also refuses neat moralizing: the truth is complicated, messy, and human.
To close: Last Rites is not only a book about decline; it is a book about acknowledgment. Ozzy acknowledges error, pain, love, and privilege. He names debts to friends and family, and he underscores the oddness of surviving so many near-misses to arrive at an era where concerts are planned around what his body allows rather than what his ego demands.
For fans, it will be a poignant final chapter; for casual readers it is a vivid illness-and-age memoir that connects a life on the loudest stages to the quietest rooms in hospitals. For anyone interested in how a public life is reconciled with private frailty, this book offers a candid, often funny, always human guide.
4. Last Rites Quotes
- “People say to me, if you could do it all again, knowing what you know now, would you change anything? I’m like, f*** no. If I’d been clean and sober, I would’t be Ozzy.”
- “Spoiler alert: I told him to f*** off. I’m busy.” (the book’s grim humour about Death).
- On Decadron and the medical spiral: “For as long as I can remember, the answer’s been a drug called Decadron, or dexamethasone. … But if you do enough Decadron, your immune system goes from suppressed to totally shut down. And that was what had happened…”
- On the quad-bike accident and surgeries: “It was the good old NHS that put me back together again – turning me from the bloke who sang ‘Iron Man’ into an actual iron man, my shoulder and spine held together with metal plates, rods and screws.”
- On memory gaps and age: “There are holes in my memory so big most of the eighties and nearly all of the nineties slipped through.”
- On Randy Rhoads and loss: “If anyone deserved to die, it was me. But when tragedy struck, it was so fucking random. I still don’t understand how it happened.” (on the plane crash that killed Randy and Rachel).
- On the tour and fans: “Every night, before I made my entrance, images of my life flashed across this huge screen above the stage… And the whole vibe of the thing, from the stage design to the mood of the crowds, was absolutely phenomenal.”
5. Last Rites Analysis
The memoir works because it’s raw: Ozzy writes like the performer he is — direct, repetitive, funny, and candid.
Evidence & reasoning: Ozzy rarely builds an argument in the academic sense; instead he assembles memory, anecdote, and reflection. Where the book is strongest is in sensory, immediate scenes (the quad crash description, the hospital ER where the doc said “Jesus fucking Christ,” the dove and bat stories) and in moments of accountability: he admits to violence, addiction, and medical hubris. These are not arguments supported by external data, but eyewitness scenes that trust the reader to triangulate.
Does it fulfill its purpose? If the purpose is to give the man a final unvarnished voice — yes. If the purpose were to produce a rigorous medical case study or an impartial history of heavy metal, then no. He’s uninterested in systematic explanation of causality; he wants to tell his truth.
Balance & fairness: the book’s self-centeredness is part of the contract — memoirs are always partial — but Ozzy does not avoid culpability. He names his addictions and admits mistakes.
6. Strengths and weaknesses
Reading this felt like being in a small room with Ozzy: awkward, amusing, and often moving.
Strengths: the vivid, voice-driven storytelling; the candid medical detail (which reads like a warning about steroid misuse and polypharmacy); the humane portrait of family (Sharon’s interventions are presented as saving acts). He also contextualises old myths (the dove/bat stories) and explains their messy, human realities. The book contains memorable one-liners and touches of literary self-awareness that are unexpectedly moving.
Weaknesses: ordering is episodic rather than strictly chronological; there are memory gaps and repetitions (the author admits to poor recall), and readers seeking tight analysis of medical causality or external corroboration will be frustrated. Some readers may find the candour too raw or the humour self-protective.
Overall, it’s compelling because its flaws are the book’s emotional truth.
7. Reception
Last Rites was widely covered and reviewed on publication and entered bestseller lists immediately.
Major outlets treated the memoir as a candid final testament: The Washington Post framed it as a haunting portrait of twilight and decline. Rolling Stone highlighted the book’s revelations and emotional moments. The Guardian published accessible “things we learned” pieces summarising the book’s most striking claims.
Trade and review outlets called it at once “honest,” “rambling,” and “life-affirming” — Kirkus called it rambling but praised the frank confessions; reviewers note the mixture of bawdy humour and real regret. Critics flagged uneven structure and repetition, but most agreed the book’s emotional center (his love for family, gratitude for fans, and regret for lost friends) lands powerfully.
Publishers and press reported bestseller placement on release; the book was repeatedly listed as a top seller and an instant New York Times/Sunday Times bestseller in the launch period.
8. Comparison with similar works
If you know music memoirs like Keith Richards’s Life or Iggy Pop’s I Need More, Last Rites sits closer to the confessional, anecdotal end of the genre.
Compared with Ozzy’s earlier memoir I Am Ozzy, this book focuses less on the early-career mythos and more on late-life medical reckoning and mortality. Compared with celebrity medical memoirs, it is less clinical and more idiosyncratic. If you want a chronology you prefer Richards; if you want near-present, day-to-day hospital detail, this is more like a modern “illness memoir” from inside the patient’s voice.
It’s also notable that the tone — bawdy, self-mocking, and sometimes bluntly tender — parallels the best of rock memoir candidness while being uniquely Ozzy in cadence and reference set. This makes it more personal but less broadly analytical than some fellow rock autobiographies.
On the medical-memoir shelf, it stands beside When Breath Becomes Air in starkness—but with Ozzy’s black comedy making the unbearable bearable.
In short: not the most literary of rock books, but an important cultural document about how fame and health collide.
8.1 Frequently searched facts
When was Last Rites published and by whom? October 7, 2025; Grand Central Publishing.
What’s covered that wasn’t in I Am Ozzy? The health years—Parkinson’s management, spinal surgeries, the “Back to the Beginning” last show, and an elder-artist’s way of staying himself.
Did Ozzy keep creating through this? Yes; he records, writes, and wins two Grammys for Patient Number 9 in 2023, a throughline in the memoir.
What’s the book’s tone? Black humor, stubborn hope, and procedural honesty (“pissing blood,” “bleeding gums,” and the stubborn get-up-tomorrow ethic).
Is there a ‘last bow’? Yes; “Back to the Beginning,” the farewell built for and by Birmingham, with family and friends as the scaffolding.
8.2 Ethical clarity & medical reality
Memoirs aren’t clinical trials, but Last Rites is unusually careful in its naming: exactly which surgeons, how many surgeries, what therapies, what setbacks, and why momentum matters.
The hard lesson: don’t let miracle cures tax your hope and wallet—he admits to being “suckered” twice and tells you how it happened so you can recognize the sales pitch next time.
The better lesson: let work (music, writing, craft) carry you between appointments; even hearing-aid hacks and harmonica lines become morale devices.
And the best lesson: accept help you can live with; reject what breaks your identity—even if a surgeon says it “solves” pain.
The book doesn’t preach; it demonstrates.
9. Conclusion
Recommendation: Read Last Rites if you value raw witness, human fragility, and the unsanitised life story of a cultural icon.
It’s ideal for: longtime fans, readers interested in addiction memoirs, and anyone who wants to see how a public life deals with private decline. It is less ideal if you need an academic history, a strictly chronological autobiography, or measured scientific explanation for the medical phenomena he describes. If you want an emotionally honest final statement from Ozzy, this is the book.
Reading this book is like visiting an old friend toward the end: uncomfortable, frequently funny, sometimes infuriating, and often heartbreakingly human. It will stick with you not because it’s tidy, but because it refuses to tidy anything away.
Final line: accept its bluntness as the form’s virtue — the memoir is an instrument for confession and legacy, and it succeeds on those terms.