THE most expensive, debated and derided musical ever on Broadway — the $75 million “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” — now has a dishy insider memoir. It chronicles the ugly slide of the once close creators, the director Julie Taymor and the composers Bono and the Edge, of U2, into a morass of betrayals, lawsuits, and petty slaps, like a producer’s yanking Ms. Taymor’s tickets for the show’s opening night.

While the book, “Song of Spider-Man,” does not have significant revelations, given the extensive media coverage of the show’s singularly troubled trajectory before its June 2011 opening, the backstage bickering, cast injuries and Ms. Taymor’s ultimate firing are rendered in close-ups by an observer especially near the action: Glen Berger, who was chosen by Ms. Taymor to collaborate on the script for the musical.

In Mr. Berger’s version of events, Bono is by turns absent and anxious, conspiring against Ms. Taymor in e-mail and late-night meetings, but then lamenting that a script rewrite after her dismissal “sounds like it’s out of ‘The Waltons.’ ” Meanwhile, Ms. Taymor becomes increasingly wounded and angered by her colleagues and producers, lashing out with comments like “You don’t have a soul” to Mr. Berger.

His tortured pas de deux with Ms. Taymor dominates the book. “Even now, I still carry the dream with me every day — to make up with her,” Mr. Berger writes in the first chapter. “I loved her. I still do. With heart-scarred bewilderment, I love her. And the thing of it is ... she despises me.”