Potted Potter anyone? Daniel Radcliffe has been asked to write his life story. Photograph: David Levene
There's apparently a bidding war for the autobiography of Daniel Radcliffe, who is 19 years old. That's funny, you might think. He has done nothing at all, apart from being blessed with mildly poor eyesight, but born at the right time, so he got a proper money-spinning gig out of them glasses, rather than being fobbed off with the Milky Bar ads (how much did that kid make, do you think? Nothing. I bet he got paid in actual bars). Then he took his clothes off in Equus. Pre and mid-pubescent girls went mad, and not for Shaffer's muscular dialogue. Then... that's it for now. I don't know why I'm being so snide. He hasn't even accepted any of the offers anyway. And besides, he has scorched himself onto the consciousness of a global generation. He has more brand recognition than, say, Henry Kissinger, who has written five books of memoirs, despite being less than five times older than Radcliffe, if only slightly.
The point does stand, however, that he hasn't done that much. Yes, yes, he's done more than I ever will, yik yak yik yak, but there is a good reason why celebrities fall foul of public opinion when they commit their young lives to book form; the autobiography, however successfully executed, is at least by intention the scattering of a life's wisdom before an attentive crowd. If it's not that, it's just gossiping about people nobody else has met. So the temptation, upon the release of an autobiography by a star in his or her twenties, is to take the piss. Terry Eagleton, when he said of David Beckham's first memoir that he "ran the gamut of emotions from chuffed to gutted", pretty much said it all. About everyone, not just Beckham, but Wayne Rooney, Jordan, Frank Lampard, Victoria Beckham (Learning to Fly, my arse). It might look as if the other uniting feature of these people, besides their being young, is that they are more, erm, physical than verbal in the main, but Kenneth Branagh, a thinking-person's autobiography writer if ever there was one, got just as much flak when he wrote Beginning, at the age of 30 (I think he was 28 when he actually wrote it, 30 when he published it. Whatever. He was still a tool).
If it's pompous to write one when you're young, though, might it also be pompous to wait til you're older? Because you're either saying "I intend to achieve far, far more than this, my friends," which might be true, but is still pompous. Or you're saying "away from the glare of immediacy, I can let my wisdom flourish", which isn't great either. Or you're saying "I will wait til all the other participants are dead, and then tell you what really happened." That isn't pompous as such, but it's a little bit arch.
I say don't write one. Or write one, change everyone's name and flog it as a novel. That's what them Whitbread winners always do, doesn't do them any harm.
