Ghostwriters are the cosmetic surgeons of celebrity memoirs, smoothing down and plumping out what the celebrity wishes to show the public. Who writes the story can be as revealing as anything included in it. Demi Moore’s superb memoir, Inside Out (4th Estate), is a case in point. She opted for the New Yorker journalist Ariel Levy, who is more associated with feminism than celebrities (I am friends with Levy, but we have never discussed her work with Moore). In 2013, Levy wrote about the death of her baby son when she was five months pregnant. Moore also lost a baby when she was five months pregnant at the age of 42, and that she chose Levy to write her memoir shows how formative she still sees this tragedy as being; Levy approaches it with powerful restraint.
Moore’s overwhelming grief about her stillbirth is made even more moving by the fact that she is spoilt for choice when it comes to tragic events in her life. They started as soon as she was born (she was lied to about who her father was), and continued throughout her childhood, culminating in her mother pimping her out as a teenager. Levy emphasises the ludicrous sexism endured by Moore at the height of her career, when she was dubbed “Gimme Moore” for getting a salary that was just over half of what her then husband, Bruce Willis, was being paid. Inside Out achieves what every good celebrity memoir should: it makes you look at the subject differently, making her; Moore emerges as simultaneously more relatable and more remarkable.
The rise of the #MeToo movement has coloured the way many women look back on their lives, and this is clearly true of Debbie Harry, whose terrific memoir, Face It (HarperCollins), seethes with a constant hum of sexual menace. Her co-writer, the music journalist Sylvie Simmons, captures Harry’s dry, deceptively casual tone, the same one that casually instructed us all to “rip her to shreds”. With seeming nonchalance, Harry will drop a line in such as: “The heroin was a great consolation,” only to work it through and conclude: “I don’t think I could have coped any other way. Drugs aren’t always about feeling good. Many times they’re about feeling less.”
Harry and Simmons are great at evoking New York in the 1970s, when a pop star could make an outfit out of a pillowcase found in a bin, but what comes across most clearly is how sexually vulnerable women were then. As a child, Harry was flashed so often “these incidents started to feel almost normal”, and her adult life was punctuated with stalkings and harassment; she would frantically open her front door just before she was grabbed. In one devastating section, she describes being held at knifepoint with her then boyfriend and bandmate, Chris Stein, while the attacker stole their musical equipment and raped Harry. “In the end, the stolen guitars hurt more than the rape,” she recalls. The incidents indeed started to feel normal.
Julie Andrews chose her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton as the co-writer for her memoir, Home Work (W&N), and it often feels as if we’re being told only as much about Andrews’s personal life as a mother would share with her daughter. On the end of her marriage to her daughter’s father, Tony Walton, Andrews says: “The attention being directed at me was becoming increasingly seductive. One or two men were showing more than a passing interest. It was an enormously challenging period for both me and Tony to navigate.” The descriptions of people are characterised by opaque cliche: Walt Disney was “twinkly-eyed”, Rock Hudson was – they exclusively reveal – “private”. Home Work is sweetly old fashioned and the perfect present for the in-law in your life.
Two of the most keenly awaited memoirs of the year are characterised by absence. The title of Andrew Ridgeley’s Wham! George and Me (Michael Joseph) reflects Ridgeley’s uncertainty about who the book is meant to lionise. He knows readers are here for George Michael, whom Ridgeley undoubtedly loved. Yet it clearly irks him that he’s been written off as little more than an enjoyable sidenote, and the book is studded with reminiscences of Michael assuring him: “I couldn’t have done it without you, Andy.” It is hard to tell what Ridgeley actually did, given that Michael quickly took full creative control of Wham! (“The decision smarted a little, but it was the right one.”) The book is constantly in argument with itself, torn between Ridgeley’s desire to celebrate his friend’s brilliance, and his desire to establish his own less-agreed-on talent. In that sense it feels a lot like a band coming apart, so perhaps gives more of an insight into Wham! than Ridgeley realises.
Poor Dan Piepenbring thought he had scored his dream job when Prince hired him to ghost his memoir, The Beautiful Ones (Century), only for the singer to die soon after signing the contract. It’s hard not to feel sympathy for the publisher who spent so long trying to lock the star into this book, with extremely valuable time being lost as the always contract-phobic Prince fiercely negotiated his terms. It’s harder not to feel sorrier for the rest of us, denied what would have been a remarkable book, even if it didn’t achieve Prince’s ambition that it would cure racism.
Piepenbring’s introduction certainly gives a sense of the singer, someone who was both otherworldly and prosaic, but this is little more than a scrapbook of the memorabilia he left behind: photos, lyrics, old interviews. Prince was always impossible to capture in print, and in the end he eluded even himself.
The celebrity memoir of the year and very possibly the decade is undoubtedly Me by Elton John, with Alexis Petridis (Macmillan), which includes the ultimate anecdote: in 1976, the mayor of Los Angeles established Elton John Week, where John unveiled his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, played two gigs in Dodger Stadium and was followed around by a documentary crew. But halfway through the week he made a very half-hearted attempt to kill himself. “I suppose I was doing something dramatic to try and get attention,” John writes. That’s right: in the middle of Elton John Week, Elton John felt overlooked. Now that’s a proper celebrity.
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