Ozzy Osbourne: Last Rites

     I've never been a fan of Black Sabbath or Ozzy Osbourne. I like some of his songs, and I enjoyed watching him on TV with his son Jack chasing ghosts, but I don’t own any of his albums or know much about him beyond that. In a way, I feel this helped me see Ozzy more as a person than a rock legend while reading his words. It stripped away the noise and let me meet the man underneath the myth. Maybe fans, for all their devotion, can’t see through that fog as easily. But from where I sat, Last Rites hit harder for being raw, unfiltered, and brutally human.

Reading this book felt less like flipping pages and more like being invited into a dark room where Ozzy sat across from me, shaking, laughing, confessing, bleeding. The memoir, finished just before his death and released October 7, 2025, reads like his last heartbeat echoing through ink. He isn’t hiding behind stage lights or leather jackets anymore. He’s vulnerable, cranky, scared, funny, and heartbreakingly aware that the curtain’s falling.

Ozzy spends much of Last Rites reflecting on the chaos of his life: the 2019 spinal injury that nearly paralyzed him, the failed surgeries, the Parkinson’s diagnosis, the endless hospitalizations. He describes the loneliness of being trapped inside a body that no longer obeys him, confessing he sometimes felt like a “crumbling statue.” You feel the exhaustion, the humiliation, and the stubborn spark of defiance that made him keep going anyway.

There are confessions that sting. He doesn’t dance around his affair that nearly ended his marriage to Sharon or his struggle with sex addiction, calling it a hollow search to fill a void he didn’t understand. He admits he lost millions through bad contracts he never read and fell for quack medical treatments that preyed on his desperation. He even confesses that fame didn’t bring him peace, just a louder kind of emptiness.

But then there’s love. Real, hard-earned love. He writes about Sharon with equal parts guilt and reverence, calling her the only constant in a life built on chaos. Their marriage, for all its wreckage, becomes one of the book’s emotional pillars. He’s honest about how close they came to breaking, and how her forgiveness became his redemption. When he talks about their conversation about death, about wanting to be buried together, it’s intimate in a way no stage or song could ever show.

There are moments of unexpected grace too. Ozzy recalls Friends actor Matthew Perry quietly attending AA meetings at his home, and the compassion that flowed between two men at war with themselves. He writes about Lemmy Kilmister’s final days and how that loss shaped his own perspective on mortality. He even takes aim at his own image, calling the “Prince of Darkness” a “bloody cartoon” that kept him alive but trapped him too.

What struck me most wasn’t the fame, the debauchery, or even the survival, it was his awareness. Ozzy isn’t looking for sympathy or sainthood. He’s saying, Here’s what I did, here’s what it cost, and here’s what’s left. There’s no sugar-coating, no PR polish. It’s a man facing his end with brutal clarity.

By the time the book reaches his final concert, his “Back to the Beginning” show in Birmingham, you can almost feel him gripping the mic with both hands, refusing to let go until the last note. He performed sitting on a throne, physically broken but spiritually defiant. Seventeen days later, he was gone. You can’t read those pages without feeling your chest tighten.

When I closed Last Rites, I didn’t feel like I’d just read about a rock star. I felt like I’d met an aging man who outlived every prophecy against him and finally decided to tell the truth. You don’t have to love his music to be moved by his honesty. You just have to appreciate courage, the kind that comes when there’s nothing left to prove.

Last Rites isn’t glamorous, and it isn’t always easy to read. It’s uncomfortable, sad, funny, and painfully self-aware. But it’s also cathartic, because when Ozzy lets go, he takes the myth with him. What’s left behind is something far more powerful, the voice of a man who’s done pretending.

He may have gone out in darkness, but this book shines like his final spark. Fans will mourn the legend. The rest of us will remember the man who finally told us who he really was.