Celebrity Memoir

From Ghostwriting to Gender Politics

Hannah Yelin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030446208
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030446215
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

In this timely analysis of the economics of access that surround contemporary female celebrity, Hannah Yelin reveals a culture that requires women to be constantly 'baring all' in physical exposure and psychic confessions. As famous women tell their story, in their 'own words', constellations of ghostwriters, intermediaries and market forces undermine assertions of authorship and access to the 'real' woman behind the public image. Yelin's account of the presence of the ghostwriter offers a fascinating microcosm of the wider celebrity machine, with insights pertinent to all celebrity mediation. Yelin surveys life-writing genres including fiction, photo-diary, comic-strip, and art anthology, as well as more 'traditional' autobiographical forms; covering a wide range of media platforms and celebrity contexts including reality TV, YouTube, pop stardom, and porn/glamour modelling. Despite this diversity, Yelin reveals seemingly inescapable conventions, as well as spaces for resistance.Celebrity Memoir: from Ghostwriting to Gender Politics offers new insights on the curtailment of women's voices, with ramifications for literary studies of memoir, feminist media studies, celebrity studies, and work on the politics of production in the creative industries.

© The Author(s) 2020

H. YelinCelebrity Memoirhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44621-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Hannah Yelin¹

(1)

Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

Hannah Yelin

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The memoirs of female celebrities reveal battlefields of self-determination. In them, famous women tell us their story, in their ‘own words’. It is an open secret, however, that constellations of ghostwriters, management and market forces orbit these texts, undermining assertions of authorship or unfettered access to the ‘real’ woman behind the public image. As a result, the ghostwritten memoir inhabits a complex grey area between biography, autobiography, fact and fiction.

A thorough interrogation of the memoirs of contemporary, female celebrities is urgent and necessary. There is a historical, representational lack when it comes to the recording of the lives of women.¹ Women’s erasure is a product of continuing patriarchal gatekeeping of official histories. Feminist philosopher Simone De Beauvoir charts the difficulty for women to define themselves in their own terms from ancient mythology to when she was writing in the mid-twentieth century.² More recently, in her stage show Nannette, comedian Hannah Gadsby laments of a long list of alleged and convicted sexual predators, including Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, ‘these men control our stories’ and they ‘don’t give a fuck about women’.³

As a successful publishing phenomenon centred upon books sold as ‘true’ female experiences, celebrity memoir, therefore, demands attention. Their enormous popularity, commercial success and resultant cultural impact are grounds for investigation in their own right. Moreover, given the historical incursions upon women’s self-representational agency, it is crucial that we attend to the fact that some of the most widely read texts authored by women are not necessarily (or at least not solely) authored by women.

The celebrity author in need of a ghostwriter is often a figure of derision. This book is not a straightforward exercise in rehabilitation of the genre per se. Indeed, at points my analysis of these texts, and the gendered power dynamics they represent, is deeply critical. However, celebrity memoir is a productive and complex cultural artefact. Far from being a reason for ridicule, ghostwriting is a fascinating microcosm of the celebrity machine. The ghosts within must be made visible if we are to understand the ways in which women in the public eye are often coaxed or curtailed when giving an account of themselves. The project of this book, then, is to reveal these oft-ignored intermediaries and the power dynamics of their presence.

Ghostwriters trigger intense cultural anxieties about both the power afforded to those who exist in the spotlight and the risk of this power falling into the wrong hands. The ghostwriter for Donald Trump’s memoir fears that the myth he created of ‘a charmer with an unfailing knack for business’ changed history for the worse by helping Trump get elected as the President of the United States.⁴ The writer who helped Instagrammer Caroline Calloway pen social media posts and a book proposal exposed her identity to a global media furore, with quality news titles around the world engrossed in the dispute, despite the fact that the memoir was never actually written and the advance on the $500,000 book deal had to be returned.⁵ The punitively gendered construction of authenticity surrounding women’s autobiographical acts is writ large in the discourses of betrayal which circulated through and around this story, and the gleeful schadenfreude at Calloway’s setbacks (albeit setbacks which she was able to parlay into a deal for a new, forthcoming book titled Scammer).⁶

The celebrity memoir occupies a nexus of promises of ‘access’ and ‘authenticity’. It combines the ‘intimate’ revelations that are central to celebrity coverage with autobiography’s promise of self-disclosure. Such promises must be interrogated in relation to the fact that these texts are so visibly mediated. Moreover, the assumption that we are capable of revealing our essential selves is based upon problematic Enlightenment ideas of personal sovereignty.⁷

How, then, can we understand the collaborative construction of these texts and its implications for both agency and ‘authorship’? The process of attributing meaning to the celebrity life story can be understood as a negotiation, not only between the (various) agents involved in the text’s construction, but in terms of how the meaning of these texts is shaped by their wider relationship with extratextual material—that is, the wealth of information we ‘know’ about a celebrity’s life from other sources.

The production of a memoir, collaborative or otherwise, is an act that claims certain forms of agency in self-representation. Yet, as they respond to external criticism from tabloids, gossip blogs or twitterstorms, these memoirs implicitly contain the regulatory narratives levelled at authors in other media. This model of what I will call the celebrity-as-assemblage applies not only to the complex mediations of collaboratively authored memoir, but also to celebrity as a whole: the performance of the celebrity self is always in dialogue with, and so constituted of, its paratexts and surrounding materials in a web of conflicting mediation. Thus, celebrity agency in self-representation can be seen to be multiple and negotiated, taking many forms.

Just as the demands of narrative in life writing must impose linear order upon the disorder of lived experience, these texts attempt to impose a singular reading upon the multiplicity of narratives that surround a celebrity. Within the boundaries of these texts, a star identity can be carefully controlled and, as such, they create an opportunity for intervention in a public image that must be constantly reclaimed, rebranded or redressed. However, because the assemblage is non-hierarchical, they can never replace or obscure the other narratives that circulate around the celebrity. This book is in part a response to calls for a better understanding of the industrial production of celebrity.⁸ I offer a framework for reading these texts which accounts for both their collaborative authorship and the industrial conditions of their construction without dismissing them as solely the cynical manufacture of corporate merchandise.

Ghostwritten memoir offers a ‘moment’ of interaction between celebrity and audience in which the concerns of celebrity culture (such as privacy, authenticity, myth-making, marketing, agency, subjectivity) uniquely coalesce in an interaction between slow, old media and instantaneous, new media. The reader of celebrity memoir is addressed individually in the celebrity’s first-person, confessional voice in a performance of constructed intimacy that is experienced as a one-on-one address and sustained for the duration of 300 pages. As such, celebrity memoirs offer a uniquely rich opportunity to interrogate celebrity culture’s promise of access to the ‘private’, ‘intimate’ self. Celebrity memoirs are constructed around this feeling of intense privacy and yet, simultaneously, are transparent exercises in public image management. Thus, the genre has much to reveal as a way of explicitly reading the bridge between publicity and privacy that is at the heart ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Ghostwritten Memoirs of Female Celebrities: Authorship, Authenticity, Agency and Gendered Access
• 3. The Economics of Access: Constructedness and the Commoditisation of Harm in the Porn-Star Memoirs of Jenna Jameson, Katie Price and Pamela Anderson
• 4. ‘White Trash’ and the Celebrity-as-Assemblage: Class, Race and Authority in the Reality TV Star Memoirs of Jade Goody, Paris Hilton and the Kardashians
• 5. The Gendered Authenticity Contract: Exposure Without Insulation in the YouTuber Memoirs of Zoella, iJustine and JennxPenn
• 6. Accessing Stars Through Autobiographical Images: Resistance, Containment, Consent and Creative Agency in the Pop-Star Visual Memoirs of M.I.A. and Lady Gaga
• 7. Conclusion: The Gender Politics of Ghostwritten Memoir
• Back Matter