Industry | 2010.01.05
Misery and celebrity: from Chris Evans to Katie Price, this is the ideal antidote to the complexity of modern living | Madeleine Bunting
Memoirs of the famous dominate the bestsellers\' lists. They don\'t provide much of a story, but do offer a parable-like clarity
Chances are that, now the Christmas presents are unwrapped and large amounts of food eaten, you are sitting slumped in varying states of alertness surveying a tome of celebrity biography that you found with your name on under the tree. Thousands of these celeb biogs were walking out of bookshops in the weeks running up to Christmas. Nearly 40,000 a week for Ant and Dec\'s Ooh! What a Lovely pair: Our Story, and over 30,000 a week for Frankie Boyle, while Peter Kay, Chris Evans and Jo Brand were all clocking a very respectable 20,000 each a week. These are hardback sales figures; lots of money is being made.
Half of the non-fiction hardback bestsellers are celeb biogs, only beaten by Delia Smith\'s latest cookery book and Top Gear \'s output. TV has well and truly hijacked the publishing industry. The big sales come when people recognise the face on the book from the box – the more recognisable the face, the bigger the sales. Welcome to a world of zombie books, because these celeb biogs often don\'t meet any of the normal criteria one would expect of a book. Forget authorship: this is writing by a team of ghostwriters. And the substance of the book often doesn\'t stack up to much of a story. First day at school, what I remember as a toddler of my mum, how I got bullied at secondary school: this is the ordinary stuff of ordinary lives, and it\'s rather odd that people fork out £20 for hundreds of pages of the stuff.
There\'s a presumption that if you are a good footballer or tennis player, you have an interesting story to tell. But why? Watching a sport can be exhilarating, reading about it can be as dull as ditchwater. Equally, a rash of comedian autobiographies make the dangerous mistake of thinking that if someone is funny, their book will be too. Dawn French\'s was a bestseller last year and now doing handsomely as a paperback; a national treasure I\'m sure, but the book, littered with exclamation marks, is achingly dull. So no story, no author, no skill in writing – what\'s the appeal?
The first explanation is that this is simply a story of commercialisation. The celebrity is offered a sum they find hard to resist; the publisher gambles on the chance of big sales helped by extensive publicity.
Publishing is like spread betting; 80% of books break even, 10% lose money, and 10% make a lot of money. Katie Price is credited with starting the boom, when her book was sold for £10,000 and went on to sell 750,000 copies. It\'s those kinds of winnings that keep publishers gambling. Whether the book is any good is secondary to issues of celebrity\'s profile and likely quantity of publicity. It\'s the latter which drives the requirement that the celebrity digs up plenty of dirt; to get headlines you need confessions of drugs, infidelity, dishonesty and other lurid details of dysfunctional lives. The celebrity misery memoir is about a crude equation of the more shock and awe, the more books sell.
If this sounds overly cynical, an advert a couple of weeks ago for a new editor for Ebury (part of Random House) was unabashed. "Amy, Lily or Cheryl – who would you choose?" ran the copy. "Do you have the ability to spot the next big thing? Do you possess a sound commercial instinct? Are you passionate about popular culture?" The advert prompted a flurry of Twitter outrage in publishing by people appalled that the advert didn\'t seem to consider that actual editing skills were needed, only celebrity spotting.
But if this is all about money, the cynics take consolation in the fact that the boom may be over. Sales figures this year are sharply down. It\'s a genre that may be burning out.
An alternative explanation is more generous to the reader. They are not just dupes of a massive commercial operation but actually get something out of reading these tomes. Just before Christmas, Tina Brown in a blog on The Daily Beast suggested that the seemingly insatiable desire for the details of celebrity lives is a response to the imponderable complexity of so many major issues. She used the continuing fascination of the Tiger Woods story to illustrate her argument; compared with recession, global warming, US healthcare reform or Afghanistan, Woods\'s story seems to offer a kind of parable-like clarity. It\'s a misery memoir in real time, showing one person\'s seemingly perfect life imploding just at the point that many people fear, or are already dealing with, losing their jobs or their homes or both. It\'s a superb form of distraction, but also a form of putting into perspective one\'s own problems. When crisis is writ so large – the income crashes; the reputation is smashed; the image of having it all, beautiful wife and family, disintegrate in front of a billion-strong audience – it makes your own anxieties seem a little smaller.
Certainly, Andre Agassi\'s fast-selling memoir, Open , published to catch the Christmas market, achieves something of this purpose. It doesn\'t fit the zombie category; it\'s relatively well-written and has a story to tell.
A tale of such a punishing, emotional roller-coaster, it left me feeling drained. The man has always absolutely loathed tennis, from the moment his bullying father had him smashing balls over the net as a child – a million a week. It\'s a tragic story of how someone ends up trapped by his own compulsions – and those of others – to live a life he hated. No one believed Agassi when he kept saying he hated tennis. This is the gilded cage of celebrity revealed in all its brutality, and you can see exactly why he might need to present a more honest account to the world.
Agassi\'s book is already credited with transcending the genre of "sportsman tells tale of inspirational achievement"; it is not a pitch for the after-dinner speech circuit. Similarly, Peter Kay\'s first volume was widely praised and sold well. But these relatively decent books are exceptions to the rule in an industry that churns out volumes of Katie Price, now on to her fourth. A celebrity is now regarded as worth more than one book – you can spin the story out to three or four at least.
This is a confessional genre, the chance for the celebrity who is much written about, speculated about, to put their story. Given libel laws, biographers tread warily into these lives, so the reader has only the partial, anxiously self-justifying "woe is me" version of a life. Above all, the appetite for these books reflects the insatiable curiosity about fame, how it arrives and what it feels like. Nothing seems to prompt as much fascination as hearing what it is like to be the focus of millions of minds.
Piers Morgan, in his recent television interview with Susan Boyle (her book can only be a matter of time, although it might be something of a challenge to keep her readers interested during the first 47 years), kept on asking: "Did you ever imagine this might happen to you?" It\'s a question that echoes the silent hopes people live with for unimaginable futures of their own, and perhaps that\'s what keeps them turning the pages.
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