Britney Spears drank daiquiris with her mother in Biloxi, Mississippi, aged 14. They called the cocktails “toddies”. Jada Pinkett Smith sold crack on the streets of Baltimore and her marriage to Will Smith was over long before he got to know about it. Barbra Streisand did her own makeup for the screen test for Funny Girl. Julia Fox says dating Kanye West was “unsustainable” because it felt like having “two babies”.
All these things and more are contained in memoirs hitting the shelves this month and into next. The publishing industry is hoping they will fly off the shelves – the equivalent of summer box-office hits – or at least recoup their advances. But will they?
Sales of non-fiction books since the pandemic peak have been soft, so publishers want more authentic and newsy memoirs. The market is crowded, and stars are able to speak directly – and with ever greater personal transparency – to fans via social media. The celebrity memoir is in a tough spot, say authors’ agents, and celebrities are being pushed by publishers to go further, in part because of pressure from social media.
“A celebrity memoir really better deliver something deeper, richer and more profound than 10 years ago,” says David Kuhn, a literary agent at Aevitas Creative Management.
Before the release of Spears’s The Woman in Me next week, several excerpts have been released. We’ve learned that she and Justin Timberlake agreed not to have the baby after she became pregnant. “It was a surprise, but for me it wasn’t a tragedy,” she writes. The singer of Baby One More Time and Oops! … I Did It Again also shared glimpses of what’s to come. “There’s a lot that people don’t know that I want them to know,” she said in a video posted on X.
“That’s the perfect set-up,” says Robert Thompson, media professor at Syracuse University. For a tell-all memoir to be relevant it has to offer something that hasn’t already been given away for free. “Social media is a promiscuous medium, so celebrities are on a minute-to-minute basis trying to maximise their audience. So they have to do something they’ve held back and that’s a tough thing to do,” says Thompson.
“There’s a sense now that a memoir that used to be a first window of the confessional is now step 90 in a perpetual exposure. In order to work, they have got to have stuff that people haven’t been tweeting about for years, and this Britney one is managing that.”
But there is a fine line to draw. Release too much information ahead of publication and customers may feel they don’t need it. Too little and the release goes unnoticed.
“There’s definitely a big appetite for celebrity memoirs, but I think there’s been a correction in recent years after some publishers paid huge advances based on a name that haven’t earned out as anticipated,” says Eve MacSweeney, a principal agent with Calligraph. “It’s clear that the quality – and level of disclosure – needs to be strong, and you’re seeing that in this new round of memoirs in which addressing the difficult stuff is a big selling point.”
“Three hundred pages is a long time to spend being addressed individually in the celebrity’s first-person voice,” says media studies professor Hannah Yelin, who notes the demands on women for personal revelation are appreciably higher than for men.
“Audience appetite, genre convention and economic formula all conspire to demand juicy revelations, and this is especially so in our sexist contemporary media culture which demands women’s exposure whether psychic or physical,” she says.
Streisand, 81, is not leaving it at 300; her memoir, out on 7 November, clocks in at 992 pages. Included, according to Vanity Fair, is the young singer-actress being propositioned by Marlon Brando at a party in 1966. “I’d like to fuck you,” Streisand reports that Brando said to her. They later became friends.
But how far is too far? Fitzcarraldo actor Klaus Kinski was sued for libel by his daughter, Nastassja, and Marlene Dietrich threatened to sue, over his hedonistic (and highly fictitious, according to director Werner Herzog) self-accounting Ich bin so wild nach deinem Erdbeermund (which translates as “I am so wild about your strawberry mouth”), later retitled All I Need Is Love.
Another memorable misfire was 1985’s Priscilla, Elvis and Me, a kiss-and-tell by Priscilla Presley’s boyfriend Michael Edwards. One reviewer confessed they had not finished it “for the same reason I didn’t finish a roast beef sandwich that contained a hair at lunch yesterday; it was simply too disgusting to continue”.
The touchstone for the current crop of memoirs is Prince Harry’s Spare. Asked if that had raised the bar, one well-known New York publisher said it didn’t raise the bar so much as “raise the barf-bag”. Still, it sold well against its reputed $20m advance, even if it did get the prince expelled from his own family.
“That book succeeded based on who Harry is, but it was a flash in the pan,” says Jon Malysiak of memoir agency Story Terrace. “It sold well, but a lot of people got everything they need from the media, sales dropped off quick.”
Publishers were given a wake-up call by memoirs that hardly made it out of the gate. They include comedian Amy Schumer’s 2016 The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, which perched on the US bestseller list for two weeks, but not long enough to warrant a $9m advance.
The book’s Amazon page was targeted by trolls delivering one-star reviews, the New York Post reported, angering Schumer so much that she cancelled promotional events. Publisher Simon & Schuster denied that, saying the cancellations were because of illness, and said the book was ultimately profitable.
Earlier this month, Hidden Gems star and former dominatrix Julia Fox released Down the Drain, a memoir previewed in the inside cover with the words: “Sometimes you have to say f*ck it and throw your life down the drain just to see where you’ll come out on the other side.” Fox is currently selling $100 tickets for her book launch/show at a Times Square theatre next week.
Many celebrity autobiographies also have the helping hand of a ghostwriter, although they are equally able to advance or destroy the exercise. Pamela Anderson’s autobiography manuscript is said to have been much better before a ghostwriter intervened.
Either way, says one New York publisher, the next few weeks will tell who is successful – and who less so – in the constructed authenticity of the memoir. They’re celebrities, they want attention, and they’re doing what they can to get it, but the field is more crowded, and the bar is higher, because of social media, they say.
