They should really have their own shelf: those books, filed uncomfortably in the shop’s biography section, with pretty people on their covers straining to look pensive without forming frown lines.
Their titles are either aspirational (Learning to Fly, Anything is Possible) or wistful (If Only), or hint at the delivery of a heart-felt truth (Just for the Record). So huge has the market for celebrity memoirs become that there are now more memoirs on the shelves than celebrities to claim them. All autobiographies offer their readers a version of the truth, but the celeb version, with its mixture of self-celebration and hard lessons learned, surely deserves a publishing category of its own.
For a start, it follows an entirely different set of rules to the rest of the genre. Conventionally, 27 years old is considered a shade young to publish your life story, but by the standards of celebrity autobiography, it is practically retirement age. So we discover this week that David Beckham has taken a second shot at his memoirs. (The first, My World — he tries to persuade the more gullible of his fans — was not a memoir but a book ”I have been involved in”.) Next month, the former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, aged 29, 34 or 38, depending on your sources, publishes Just For the Record, the cover line of which — ”You think you know me. You don’t” — seems rather unjustified coming from a woman whose first ”all-revealing” autobiography was published less than three years ago. Former manager of the Leeds United soccer club, David O’Leary, has knocked out three versions of his life story to date, with more, surely, to come.
”It can be slightly annoying,” says Jane Ridley, a lecturer on biography at Buckingham University, England, who has taken six years to write her book The Architect and his Wife, about the life of the 19th-century architect Edwin Lutyens. ”When you’ve taken that length of time to write and research something, and you see celebrity memoirs that have been written in two months being given so much more publicity. I suppose some of them can be very good. But you do not expect to take anything lasting away from them. They are written with one eye on what is newsworthy. They are ephemeral. You read them as you would a newspaper.”
The tone of the celeb-memoir is by turns chatty, cocky, sad, reflective (although never regretful — regret is not an emotion permitted in Celeb World, because every mistake is a valuable learning experience) with a heavy reliance on diary form, presumably because it takes up lots of space and lessens the word count. The ordinariness of the subject’s background is usually flagged up to emphasise just how well they’ve done. The message to their mainly teenage readers is: you could achieve all this, too (but you probably won’t).
For ghost writers the effort of extracting 100 000 coherent words from a subject more used to expressing themselves in grunts or football swerves can be a hard task. ”It is like getting blood from a stone,” says the ghostwriter of a famous pop star’s autobiography, bound by contract to remain anonymous. ”Ghostwriting is a particular skill, because you are verbalising the thoughts of people who, although very intelligent, aren’t necessarily able to express themselves easily. You have to think of so many ways to ask the same question, to explain why the reader would want more detail about this or that, why it isn’t sufficient to trot out the usual anecdotes — all this without making them feel stupid or judged. It’s almost like therapy.”
For the tongue-tied celebrity, there are easier ways of making money. So narcissism aside, why do they do it? ”For the celebrity, it is a way of countering and controlling their public image,” says Jason Cowley, literary editor of the New Statesman. ”It gives them the chance to put a sanitised and crafted version of their lives into the public arena, which counters the narrative of the daily papers. The irony is that sometimes the books are turned out so fast the celebrity isn’t in control at all. David O’Leary claimed that he didn’t even know the title of his before it came out.”
What is published might be a censored version of themselves, but that is not, say some, to say the celebrity memoir is without merit. Tom Weldon, publishing director at Penguin Books, which has just published footballer Roy Keane’s memoir, is frustrated by the critics’ snobbery: ”Publishers should cater for every type of audience. Like any genre, there are good celebrity books and bad ones.”
If there is one thing Weldon has learned it is that the fame of the subject does not guarantee the success of the autobiography. British television personality Anthea Turner’s memoir, Fools Rush In, turned out to be aptly entitled when it was taken off the shelves months after publication.
”Someone like [comedian and actor] Billy Connolly’s book has done exceptionally well because it’s interesting and well-written,” says Weldon. ”It’s not enough that the subject of the book is famous — the reading public is more discerning than that.”
Even if a book is awful, however, a publication deal will still be struck as long as the market is driven by newspaper serialisations, huge amounts paid by OK! and Hello! magazines and an appetite for sublime self-pity. — Â