My Beef with Celebrity Memoir
The problems inherent with elevating the person over the craft of writing (or how to unlearn bad habits from the memoirs you might be reading)
This month I’m wrapping up seven years of cohosting my podcast (formerly Write-minded, now Memoir Nation) with
. This week, we’re breaking a tradition I didn’t even realize we were keeping until I started thinking about why we don’t bother to try to get celebrities on our show. We’ve had guest celebrities of the literary variety—Mary Karr, Annie Lamott, Kiese Laymon, Tayari Jones, Pico Iyer, Elizabeth Gilbert, Jane Smiley, and many others. Still, if you’re not a big reader, or adjacent to the literary world, maybe you don’t know all these names.This week we’re bringing on Jeff Hiller (of “Somebody, Somewhere” fame). I see Jeff at a level of celebrity that’s on par with some of our more famous literary guests. In other words, he’s not Hollywood famous. Not yet, at least. He describes himself as having fought his way to the “lower middle rung of the ladder,” which is relatable for a lot of writers. Some of the writers I work with feel like they’re fighting to catch a glimpse of the ladder, never mind reach a rung.
So yes, we’re bringing Jeff on to talk about his new memoir—and it’s an amazing interview. I love Jeff Hiller. There is no one on TV in recent years who’s brought me more joy than his character Joel. And his book, Actress of a Certain Age**, is fun and funny, as you’d expect, so I apologize to him in advance for using his episode as a springboard to write about the things I don’t like about celebrity memoir. But this is my process. I wake up Sunday mornings and write about what’s on my mind from the week before. You’re getting it fresh.
The reason we shy away from celebrity memoirist guests on the podcast is because we don’t read much of it. And, if I’m being honest, I kind of resent it. When I came up in book publishing in the early 2000s, celebrity memoir wasn’t a thing. Celebrities wrote autobiographies, and memoir was the domain of writers. But as memoir has gotten more popular, so has the term itself—so you don’t hear people call anything autobiography anymore. It’s a term that’s been subsumed by memoir. Which is how Michelle Obama’s Becoming and Barbra Streisand’s My Name Is Barbra are memoirs when really they’re autobiographies.
This might seem like a matter of semantics and categories and who cares, but there are a couple problems celebrity memoir in general and category smooshing in particular pose for regular memoirsts.
Problem #1: Celebrity memoir has taken over big publishing.
Recently, memoirist Gina Frangello (Blow Your House Down**) shared a story with me about an author (of memoir) she’s working with who had three agents fight over her manuscript. Fast forward—and the agent couldn’t sell the book. Frustrated, of course, the agent’s explanation was that the Big Five are only interested in buying celebrity memoirs.
Now look, it’s not like this is a new phenomenon—that you have to be famous to get a book deal. And there will always be notable exceptions. My friend Sara Kehaulani Goo, author of Kuleana, who was a guest on Memoir Nation recently, isn’t famous and she got an amazing book deal from Macmillan. And . . . Sara has been a journalist at Axios and The Washington Post (i.e., platform), and she wrote a book about a place (Hawai’i) and topics (land rights and the displacement of indigenous peoples) that’s pretty unique in the world of memoir.
That said, editors at big publishing houses are the most risk-averse people in the industry. They have to be because they have big numbers to hit. The only way to project big sales is by acquiring big names—and in the world we live in, big name = celebrity. It’s not rocket science. This practice also edges out writers who have important stories to tell. The “celebritization of book publishing” was one of the things I groused about in my TEDx talk, being as it was the primary reason I left traditional publishing. The pressure to acquire books based on the person over the story irked me because real memoir is the story. You might argue that the two are inextricable, and sure, but readers pick up memoir for the topic, the subject matter, and to read about what the writer lived through; they pick up (what we used to call) autobiography for the backstage pass to a well-known person’s life.
Problem #2: It’s the craft, stupid.
When I do read celebrity memoir, I feel like a mom who wants to shield her children from bad habits. A simple definition of memoir is one I borrow from my friend, the author Samantha Dunn, who once told me that autobiography is the story of a life and memoir is a story from a life. Beyond celebrities writing what are really autobiographies, a lot of them are committing craft sins they don’t even recognize because they’re not students of the genre.
This doesn’t mean the writing is bad, or the stories aren’t interesting (it isn’t and they are), but a couple celebrity memoirs I’ve read paint a good example of what I’m talking about. Trevor Noah in his memoir Born a Crime and Will Smith in his memoir Will both do this thing of consistently and often bursting into a past scene (or vignette) as the present-day narrator to tell you things they’re thinking about now, at the time of the writing as opposed to keeping readers in the moment (even when reflecting). In the memoir classes I teach, we call that “breaking the fictive dream.” You may also hear it talked about as falling “out of scene.” It strikes me that even if celebrities are good writers or storytellers, they’re not necessarily trying to learn the craft of memoir. The couple semi-recent singers’ memoirs I’ve read—Kathleen Hanna’s Rebel Girl and Brandi Carlile’s Broken Horses—suffer the from the same peccadillo. Often the orientation of celebrity memoirs is the writer in the present moment looking back at their life, remembering things and narrating the past from the present rather than being or staying “in scene” and narrating the events from within the scene (which is essential for good scene-writing).
As a memoir teacher, these books pose an uphill battle because I’m trying to teach students to unlearn or not do things they’re seeing and reading in books by very famous people. And at some point the rules and best practices around things like good craft get so trampled that you stop trying to enforce them. Some people might celebrate fewer restrictions, and I’ve been a loud advocate for the evolution of the genre, but celebrity memoir by and large is diluting what I love best about memoir: the craft. If I were pointing people where to go to learn the craft, there are only a couple celebrity memoirs I’d recommend—and both of them were written by J.R. Moehringer* (author of the The Tender Bar).
Now’s the part of the post where I back-pedal and tell you how much I love Jeff Hiller’s book. It’s self-deprecating and funny and sweet, insightful and charming, just like him. Also, his memoir is best classified as memoir-in-essay, which is common for comedy writers-turned-memoirists—like Tina Fey, Chelsea Handler, Mindy Kaling, Samantha Irby, Ali Wong, and others. I might put these folks in a class of their own because comedy and humor lends itself to vignette-style writing, and there’s much to learn about pinpointing a moment, then drawing out why it matters and delivering on the humor or poignancy. Funny writers do this better than most.
Don’t miss Jeff Hiller’s episode on Memoir Nation this week (of July 14). His laugh is contagious and I’ve not laughed this much in an interview in all these seven years.
I skim or pass up most Substacks I subscribe to but I always read yours. You have something to say and you say it succinctly.
This topic pulled me in because I have always shunned “memoirs” or autobiographies from celebrities. Why? Well for me it’s because when I read memoir it needs to be written by the average person that has faced adversity and I want to know how they got through it. The common folk are the people I relate to, not those with privilege which is out of reach for a vast majority of us. Your beef might be more with their lack of artful technicalities but mine is the idea that they’ve already had their moment in the sun, now move over and let someone else have theirs. I do love this quote, “The author Samantha Dunn who once told me that autobiography is the story of a life and memoir is a story from a life.”