I could have survived without knowing about Al Pacino’s penis or Josh Brolin’s unnatural attraction to his mother. Or that Barbra Streisand took 10 years to write her memoir (it might take that long to read it too, at nearly 1,000 pages). And now I can’t un-know these things. The recent books by these stars continue the trend of over-sharing their under-examined lives, and perhaps say something about those reading them.
Glamour sells. So do trauma and pain. Parental ill-treatment is a path to millions in book advances (especially if you are already a millionaire). We may be in the golden age of the celebrity memoir, where the genre is poised between trash and seriousness, where sometimes honesty is faked and authenticity merely another word for the spurious. The genre can’t slip back into trash without alienating its new readers, nor can it swing the other way without losing its essentially gossipy value. Behind every celebrity is a horrific story, and behind her is a publisher waiting with a cheque book.
Actor and singer Barbra Streisand says it took her 10 years to write her memoir, ‘My Name is Barbra’.
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Getty Images
This trauma-spewing signals a cultural change. A generation ago, the best memoirs had gossip, and were humorous light reads. You read, skipping whole pages, laughed at the jokes and passed it on to someone sitting next to you in the aircraft. A good example is Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up (2007).
Now, Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me abounds in, as The New York Times said, “revelations of the kind that send gossip-site algorithms into overdrive: most notably her relationship with Timberlake, with whom she was “pathetically” in love, and the abortion he more or less demanded she get when she became pregnant”. Readers take such admissions as their due.
Letting it all hang out is a sport of the times. Celebrities are saying in effect this is my story, I will tell it the way I want to, I don’t care about your judgement or approval. The reader’s response is to ask for more. Celebrities live their external lives on social media, forcing their memoirs to throw light on their inner lives.
Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake in New York, 2001.
| Photo Credit:
James Devaney
The breathless prose, the calibrated revelations, the studied name-dropping and the casual insults of friends and colleagues are all geared towards one objective: to present the celebrity as being both ethereal and ordinary, worthy of worship and million-dollar fees. The celebrity genre is, if we are to believe the endorsements, about difficult childhood, hard work, profound insights. It is a beacon of odds-overcoming, circumstances-fighting and joy-spreading. It is a global press conference determined to go beyond social media posts.
Such celebrity branding is a win-win situation all around. The celebrity is paid millions, some of which might find their way to the ghostwriter, publishers expect many times that in return, readers are excited about the ‘revelations’, and those who avoid the books still get to read the juicy parts in media interviews and book excerpts.
The first volume of singer Cher’s memoirs begins: “Often when I think of my family history, it sounds like the opening of a Dickens novel.” It took seven years, and plenty of ghostwriters to brings us to the singer and actor’s 30th year. Cher is 78 and her adoring public awaits volume two in the new year. Her life, the publisher has told us, is “too immense for only one book”. Cher herself is less full of it, saying she had to “tell it or give back the money”.
We live in an age where reality can be whatever we want it to be. My struggle is always greater than yours, my trauma deeper and more adhesive. Memoirs by Spears and the late Matthew Perry — the former was paid an advance of $15 million — told us more than we wanted to know. Perry’s Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing was limping along till his unfortunate death caused it to shoot up in the bestseller list.
You know what to expect when Paris Hilton’s memoir Paris, has the subtitle: ‘A true story of resilience in the face of trauma and rising above it all to success’. Ah! The poor little rich girl. More resilient and traumatised than children bombed during wars, maybe?
American socialite and media personality Paris Hilton at a book signing in London, March 2023.
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Getty Images
Not all celebrity memoirs follow the struggle-success-stardom-sex pattern, of course. Michelle Obama’s Becoming — did publishers really pay the Obamas $65 million for their efforts? — is low on trauma, high on hope, according to one review. Apparently written by a committee headed by a friend, it sold 14 million copies in two years.
Ghostwriters — most prefer ‘collaborators’ — become celebrities in their own right. J.R. Moehringer who wrote Prince Harry’s Spare and also ghosted Andre Agassi’s Open distilled the essence of the job in a New Yorker piece where he talked about advising Prince Harry, “It’s not the story of your life. It’s a story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people…” And, in another place, “…(ghostwriters) provide a vital public service, helping to shore up the publishing industry, since most of the titles on this week’s best-seller list were written by someone besides the named author.”
And so back to Pacino’s penis. At 10, he slipped on a fence and an “iron bar hit me directly between the legs”. But no harm done. He became a father last year at 83.
The writer’s latest book is ‘Why Don’t You Write Something I Might Read?’.
Published – December 27, 2024 04:40 pm IST
The Hindu Sunday Magazine
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