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“Every celebrity memoir is an attempt at creating, packaging and selling a personal myth,” writes Landon Y. Jones in his new book, Celebrity Nation. It’s a confronting statement. Certainly, it was true in the past, when Sarah Bernhardt gave birth to the genre with tales of triumph against the odds, and P. T. Barnum gave a humbug and hokum-filled account of his showbiz life.
Magda Szubanski’s book digs deeper than the usual celebrity memoir.Credit: Simon Schluter
But what about today? Don’t the best celebrity memoirs impress us because they are so searingly honest, prepared to tell all about their worst moments? We’ve been down so many dark tunnels of alcoholism, drug dependency, disastrous relationships, child abuse and mental instability with our heroes. Often they confess that much of the mess was their own fault. Are we really being hoodwinked?
According to Jones, it’s precisely those traumas the authors have managed to overcome that shape many modern celebrity memoir myths. He quotes from Will Smith’s memoir, Will, about the fragile construct of the self. “Will Smith” is a character invented, practised and performed, reinforced and refined by friends, loved ones and the external world.
I doubt that Prince Harry fans were too worried about fragile constructs of the self when they bought his memoir, Spare. It became the fastest-selling nonfiction book of all time after it sold 1.4 million copies in one day.
Readers were after revelations, gossip and dirt, as well as a better sense of what the monarchy has done to its latest renegade, and there’s nothing wrong with that curiosity. But the consensus seems to be that it isn’t the best celebrity memoir of all time.
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So, what does make a good celebrity memoir? Britain’s Guardian newspaper did a survey of publishers last year when celebrity memoir sales were patchy. Simon & Schuster’s managing director of adult publishing in Britain, Suzanne Baboneau, said the writer preferably has to have an instantly recognisable name, a story they write themselves rather than turning to a ghostwriter, and a willingness to promote authentically. Another factor is the chance we get to glimpse a part of their life that has previously been hidden.
Allie Jones in The Atlantic argues that the best celebrity memoirs, whether ghostwritten or not, have an honest, grounded perspective on the author’s life. She cites a few favourites: “They are revealing and also have compelling narrative arcs. There is gossip, but it never seems gratuitous.”
If you count politicians and their spouses as celebrities, you’d have to include Barack and Michelle Obama as two of the best memoir writers. Perhaps particularly intimate was Michelle’s first memoir, Becoming, a phenomenal bestseller about the making of an extraordinary woman that was most fascinating when she wrote about the days before she met her future husband. As one reviewer wrote, it was hard to shake the illusion that Michelle was her friend.
Some of the best Hollywood memoirs were written by Carrie Fisher. From Wishful Drinking to The Princess Diarist, they are witty and revealing. One of the highest praised sports memoirs is tennis great Andre Agassi’s Open, whose ghostwriter, J.R. Moeringher, also ghosted Spare. Outstanding rock star memoirs have come from Keith Richards, Dave Grohl and Jimmy Barnes. My favourite is Just Kids, Patti Smith’s account of her days with Robert Mapplethorpe in 1970s New York: it’s romantic and real.
For charming and funny Australian stories, go to the five books by Clive James, which now come in two volumes as The Complete Unreliable Memoirs. But for stories that dig a little deeper, read Magda Szubanski’s Reckoning or Hannah Gadsby’s Ten Steps to Nanette. Maybe these are myths according to Landon Y. Jones’s definition, but they are also moving and convincing.
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