I suspect the sympathy is lacking because after he exploded his marriage (an affair of three years will do that) it's become about his feelings in the fallout.
Who else’s feelings should his memoir be about though ?
He has to earn a living. He has children to support as well as his own self. His comedy work mostly dried up, or stopped paying so well. He can write. He picked memoir given he had recently been through some “interesting times”.
If he leaves out the parts that make him look awful he risks the press revealing them, but if he leaves them in he is monetising them. The latter still looks more appealing than risking a red top expose to me. At least you have some kind of control over when these bad deeds come under a spotlight. From the link above I got the impression he was now on good terms with his ex-wife and involved in his children’s lives. Which means presumably he ran it past her, if not get her actual blessing.
People do shitty, shitty things. They use suicide not only to emotionally blackmail, they also perform it successfully, in the most gruesome way, with an unsuspecting audience selected for lifelong trauma via witnessing it. But, so far based on the reviews and the new stories I read, his account of coming uncomfortably close to suicide is not one of exerting control or punishing with “look what you made me do!”. It seems to be much more along the lines of I’ve achieved nothing but hurt and pain for the people I was supposed to protect from the world.
I’ve experienced the pain of spousal and parental infidelity. I’d pick being punched in the face repeatedly over ever feeling that pain again. If nothing else broken bones and bruises heal much much faster than a wounded soul. If it hurts so intensely to be on that end of it, what might be the weight of the guilt at having inflicted that on your wife and children ? It’s so destructive it may feel impossibly heavy for some people.
I’m not sure I’d feel the same way about his book were I still so near the pain of infidelity. But I’ve had a lot of time to process it. So I’m at a point where any life that can be saved, any hope that can be spread, any “you are not alone” that can proffered, has to be better than not.