You can tell it’s getting close to Christmas from
the glossy tell-alls piling up in the shops. Out of the current top ten
hardback non-fiction chart no fewer than six titles are celebrity memoirs.
Getting well groomed, expensively dressed actor and
singer types to turn up at the annual staff barbecue is a nice bonus for publishers,
but the real reason these books exist is that folks like Cheryl Cole have the
kinds of fanbases mere fiction authors can only dream of.
Consider: 12 million people watch The X-Factor. So if just ten percent stumble
into a shop and accidentally buy Tulisa’s new book... kerching!
Be warned though. Sleb books (as I shall now irritate
you by calling them) come in two broad categories. There is highly rare but
prized “great story involving a Sleb”. Remember Richard Hammond from Top Gear writing about the crash that nearly
killed him? Corking stuff. Sold a shed-load. But the follow up in which he
mused about stunt biker Eval Kneival....er... didn’t.
Which brings us to the common or garden “Sleb in
search of a story, any story”.
Take Miranda Hart for instance. If you love her BBC1
comedy series, ahem, Miranda, and
many apparently do, then I guess you might well get a kick from Is It Just Me? in which said famously
tall person discusses life themes with her 18 year old self. (Yup. She really
does.)
Literary types might suspect the well-educated Ms
Hart (she went to boarding school and played Lacrosse) is channelling not just
the classic dialogues of Plato and Aristotle, but also Tristram Shandy, the
celebrated 18th century meta-novel which spends most of its time
worrying about how to begin. She even addresses us as My Dear Reader Chum or
MDRC for short. But ol’ Shandy just wasn’t as “hilaire”, a term that crops up a
lot, as ol’ Miranda.
A lot of Hart’s comedy is based on embarrassment,
but the embarrassment that oozed from these pages was that of an otherwise
talented performer and writer who had a highly lucrative contract to deliver a
book when she had very little to put in it.
Perhaps Miranda is too young, at 37, to have a
proper biography or a memoir in her. But then there’s Tulisa, who has just
published Honest at the grand old age
of 24. And it’s packed with... stuff. No Lacrosse jolly sticks here: Tulisa
grew up in gritty North West London, lost her virginity at 14, and was a pop
star about five minutes later. She likes to “get up to mischief”, a phrase she
actually uses, and the detail, as you would expect, is fairly intense: “Chapter Five: After my success in Bugsy
Malone at primary school, I was determined that I would become a recording
artist.” Gasp.
High points include going to a strip club with her
non-boyfriend record producer (“Of
course, the press were all over it”) and how she never slept with Mark
Wright from The Only Way is Essex (“Why is it that I can’t be friendly, or even
a bit of a flirt with a guy without everyone presuming I banged him?”)
Saturday night TV fans will note that Tulisa is up
against Strictly Come Dancing’s Bruno
Tonioli, not only as judges on rival shows but on the bookstand, which brings
me to one of the few genuinely good reasons to buy Sleb books: embarrassing
pictures of the subject’s youth.
Bruno’s pics are particularly hilaire: as a toddler he was clearly rescued from the Italian
version of The Addams Family and as a
teenager from the Italian version of The
Breakfast Club. You’ve never seen so much hair and teeth. Or man nipple.
But the actual content? How can I break it to you darling? You write like a
moose... doing a tango... wearing a swimsuit... on its head. Pass the sickbag.
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