'I wish I could enjoy it like you're supposed to. I wish I could be that guy'at least for an hour. I wish I could live in the place people are making for me. I want to be popular, but I don't trust it.' That is Frank Gehry, speaking late at night and late in life, among friends, while being feted at the opening of his Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in October 2014. He lunched with the president of France. He had a huge career retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. The opening exhibition at his remarkable new building was devoted to him. Gehry, 86, a man of several careers like that other Frank'Lloyd Wright'had been a world star since the opening of his Bilbao Guggenheim in 1997. If anyone had cause to feel satisfied with his career, it was Gehry. Yet he worried. He had always worried. Paul Goldberger's excellent new biography is a history of an anxiety-driven, needy, thin-skinned genius'one quite capable of giving critical questioners the finger, as he famously did at a different event shortly after the Paris museum opened.

This is a proper biography, being as much about the personal life of Gehry as it is about his buildings. It reads well, mostly avoiding archi-speak and technicalities, preferring the clarity of plain English, as you would hope from a critic of Goldberger’s standing. He is plainly on Frank’s side—he has known him so long, and voices little personal critical dissent. But he does not avoid the turkeys, and when a building is critically panned—the Experience Music Project in Seattle, say, or the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which set off a revolt by several English critics (though not this one)—he reports it. This is an authorized biography, done with Gehry’s full cooperation but without his editorial control. And I believe it, because this is no hagiography. The flaws of Gehry the person are laid bare.