The best celebrity memoirs have exactly what literature today lacks

Back when I was a practising book reviewer, I had a shortcoming that fatally hampered my progress in the literary world. I found it impossible to be dishonest in print. If a book was no good, I didn’t think it was my job to dance around that fact.

Mind you, I tried to avoid hurting people’s feelings if I could. If I knew up front that I wasn’t going to like a book, I generally turned the assignment down. This meant that I turned down a lot of contemporary fiction. I left that job to reviewers who liked the stuff, or at least claimed to.

Jimmy Barnes kicking of the book tour of his new memoir Working Class Boy in 2016.Credit: Louie Douvis

Celebrity memoirs struck me as a more feasible target for abuse, if abuse proved to be necessary. If you say that a novelist is no good at writing, you’re delivering a mortal insult. If you say that a celebrity can’t write, you won’t be hurting them at a fundamental level.

Here’s the twist, though. As more and more celebrity memoirs crossed my desk, I found that the best of them were written with a robust, fearless honesty that I’ve almost given up looking for in current fiction. For my money, today’s best celebrity memoirs are at least as literary as the stuff that’s sold to us as quality lit.

Take Working Class Boy, the first volume of Jimmy Barnes’s memoirs. When that book came out, I hailed it as a classic of Australian autobiography. Nearly a decade later, I haven’t changed my mind.

By every measure I care about, Barnes’s book was a piece of literature. The purpose of literature, said Joseph Conrad, is “by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, above all, to make you see.”

Barnes’s memoir did all those things. In stark and arresting prose, it evoked a childhood of incredible squalor. In one passage Barnes recalled standing at the kitchen sink as a child, scrubbing cat shit off a potato. Stray cats had been using the family’s weekly bag of potatoes as a toilet. As an alternative to starving, the Barnes children had to eat the spuds anyway. How’s that for a resonant word picture of poverty?

If making you feel is what works of art do, the best celebrity memoirs are works of art. I had this thought again recently, as I read Entrances and Exits, the new memoir by Michael Richards, who played Kramer on Seinfeld. As a hardcore Seinfeld fan, I bought the book with trepidation. I didn’t want Richards to have written a disposable book.

But his book is far from disposable. It’s one of the best accounts I’ve read of what it’s actually like to be a celebrity. All his life, Richards has struggled to understand who he is when he’s not playing a role. His book is a sustained attempt to work through that question. There’s not a sentence in it that’s been written just to make the author look good.

Richards has made mistakes, but you can’t fail to be moved by the courage with which he uses his memoir to face up to them. The effect is enhanced in the audiobook version, read by Richards himself in a tone that ranges from amused to baffled to downright haunted.

Most people never get to write the story of their lives. Celebrities are offered the opportunity as a matter of course. Some cash the cheque and phone the book in. Others do what Barnes and Richards did. They sit down and write real books. They use the process of writing to discover things about themselves they didn’t already know.

Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up was another masterpiece of celebrity autobiography. So was Andre Agassi’s Open. So was Tina Fey’s Bossypants. In both cases you found yourself in the company of a first-rate intellect who had thought deeply about his trade. If it’s the job of literature to universalise the particular – to derive insights from one life that apply to all lives – then both books were works of literature.

When Open came out, it was tempting to chalk up its surprising excellence to the influence of Agassi’s ghostwriter, the famously expensive J. R. Moehringer. But when Moehringer ghosted Prince Harry’s worthless Spare, it became clear that no amount of fancy ghostwriting can redeem a memoir whose nominal author is more interested in self-pity and self-justification than self-examination. Some celebrities are tough-minded and self-critical, and some are like Prince Harry.

And then there is Keith Richards, who stands in a class of his own. Keith’s Life was the kind of memoir you dream of reading. It was a fiesta of hilariously unfiltered candour. After it appeared, Keith had to apologise to Mick Jagger for having casually informed the book’s readers that Mick has a “tiny todger.”

A writer, said Thomas Mann, is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people. The best celebrity memoirists are willing to be writers in that true sense. They go deep. They remind us of what books are for, and of why we still need them. If they throw in some gossip about the size of other celebrities’ todgers, that’s just the icing on the cake.