Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography

But magic is like pizza: even when it's bad, it's pretty good.

When she is three, you catch her singing Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball,” a song nobody should sing until they’re at least dead.

Squee.” 1 (verb): To emit an onomatopoetic girlish swooning sound out of pure fanboy adulation. 2 (noun): the sound itself.

You are Doogie Howser, M.D., and you will remain officially so for four years, and unofficially so, to some extent, for the rest of your natural life.

comin’ straight outta Brentwood, a cadre of young stars who’ve grown up deprived of deprivation trying to transform themselves into street toughs by forming ““gangs”” so devoid of street cred it’s necessary to put the word in two sets of quotes. What kind of criminal activity are they engaged in? Script laundering? Agent smuggling? Film miscasting? Who knows. They think they have a posse when what they really have is a pose.

Sometimes as a doctor, the best treatment is no treatment at all. But today was definitely not one of those times. RIP, van full of senior citizens. Next time I'll use medicine.

So pluck up your courage and take that risk! Add another story to the book of your life. Even if it doesn’t go the way you planned or wanted, you’ll still learn from it. Adventure

Summer doesn't seem to come fast enough, but finally Mom and Dad drop you off, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed*, at NMSU. *Not really. You're prepubescent, so no bush.

Then you go backstage and get a tour, and this to you is truly the coolest thing in the world. You’re shown the set and the lights and the costumes and learn another variation on the same basic lesson about showbiz you will learn over and over again—it’s all, fundamentally, just a bunch of crap glued together and spray-painted over. But the wonderful paradox is that knowing this does not detract from the experience of watching it a second time. On the contrary: it makes it that much more miraculous.

You experience them experiencing pure magic, unadulterated by cynicism or irony or self-consciousness. And as the ride makes its full circle, so do you, until Peter Pan has done it again, and you are once more a child, taking it all in, amazed, overwhelmed, enchanted.

As childhood gives way to adolescence you are interested in girls, but in a confused, quasi-perfunctory way. It’s what’s expected of you. Boys in high school date girls, and so you do too, but it’s awkward.

But you never wind up with a girlfriend who’s viscerally excited by your advances or into your touch, and the fact that you don’t is probably not a coincidence.

Some would say you were in a closet. Some would say you didn’t even know you were in a house. The “truth” about a person’s sexual preference is often revealed through a long journey of tiny steps, and acceptance is one of the last ones. It’s an individual story for every person. There are unique personal prejudices in everyone, created by our families, our social circles, and mostly by ourselves. It’s tough to confront those things that you are afraid of in yourself.

You come in weighing a very average, very sexy seven pounds, seven ounces. As it happens, that is also the exact weight of an Emmy Award. Coincidence? Yes … but true fact? No.

Welcome to the Oscars on this beautiful night! We’re here to honor movies and we’re doing it right! But before we continue I’ve got something to say: I’m Neil Patrick Harris and I’m gay!