There is, of course, an over-abundance of journalists in Australia, and too few publications to accommodate them. A round of sackings of any number of the nation’s staff writers should be considered at once to make room for Hope and pay him generously so that he is rescued from living penuriously in cockroach-infested dwellings and from wallowing jauntily in his sense of having missed the boat to thespian stardom.

In this teeth-grating era of barely literate, self-congratulatory, self-promoting memoirs and autobiographies by high achievers whose sentences seem copied straight from The Oxford Book of Clichés, if such a thing exists (and it should!), Hope’s tale of woe, wooing and wasting one’s life in vain pursuit of fame and fortune is bliss. His is an antiode to being resigned to not quite achieving what one set out to do; to almost making it; to brushing the tip of fame, as it were – in short, failing. ‘If I haven’t made it by now [he’s pushing forty] I’m never going to, am I?’ is the between-the-lines sentiment that one feels emanates from the pages. There’s the sense that hapless Hope – you may remember him (I didn’t) as the star of the Australian movie Bad Boy Bubby (1993) – is going to give up the acting game any minute.

Hope won an AFI Best Actor Award for his role as Bubby. His performance was critically acclaimed all over the globe. The film became a cult classic. The box-office receipts, alas, left a lot to be desired. Hope did not emerge as a bankable star. Despite predictions from peers and the press that he was the ‘man who will soon be famous’, Hope’s career stalled. He did some television, some small film jobs here and there – one being in the frozen backwaters of Norway – while Crowe, Kidman, Collette and the like rushed past him to Hollywood glory.

If only he’d gotten that role in Seven, the one Kevin Spacey pipped him for, Christ knows what would have transpired. He might have become Kevin Spacey. Instead, he wrote this book. Please buy it. He needs the cash.

If cheery failure in life has a masterpiece, Brushing the Tip of Fame might be it. Hope’s strengths as a writer are severe honesty and a history of having lived out the paradoxical, which ensure that he has gamesome subject matter to work with. Here’s an example:

I’m in a limousine on my way to meet Rolf [Bubby writer-director Rolf de Heer] and the publicist from Village Roadshow for a journalists’ dinner and a day of interviews in preparation for the opening of Bubby in Australia. It’s nine a.m., I’m fretting. I need to deliver my dole form to the city social security office. The publicist has arranged for the driver to take me there on the way to the meeting. I fear it may look a little ostentatious . . . There is a small queue that I have to run past at the dole office. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I apologise, ‘the car, it’s double-parked, I’ve got an interview.’ People turn to look and see the silver limo outside. The driver casually waves.

As for that honesty I mentioned, Hope performs a hatchet job on himself: he’s prepared to allow his vanity, egoism, graspingness, insecurity and envy to shine through. His dialogue is crisp, blunt and dramatic, particularly when dealing with sexual frustration, moments when he, a bit of a prude at heart, wishes he could discover his ‘inner Keith Richards’ and race the nearest available star-fucker off her stilettos and onto her back.

It is a brand of reportage and gonzo diarism that’s refreshing without being so original or literary as to render him an unemployable freak as a journo. Indeed, there are just enough weaknesses in his prose to guarantee that he’ll fit into the business just fine. Not least, the odd juvenile tic of expression such as saying ‘I am sooo grateful’ when one ‘o’ should suffice a grown man.

Given regular work at this writing racket, I’m confident he’ll soon discover his inner-hack.