Make space for Matthew Perry, Trevor Noah and others
Do you lovers of novels balk at the spectre of non-fiction? Do you subscribe to the school of thought that non-fiction books were invented as an alternative to medically approved sedatives? Do you cast aspersions on a person’s character based on the contents of their bookshelf?
From one fiction lover to another, you, of course, are free to cast as many aspersions on non-fiction aficionados as you choose. However, you may need to make a small space in your heart for the purest form of escapist non-fiction the literary world has to offer: the coveted celebrity memoir.
One hastens to add that whilst a celebrity memoir may not be as insufferable as a self-help manual, it is still in danger of causing you to weep like an English teacher up to their eyeballs in mediocre essays. Bearing this in mind, please allow a moment of silence for Prince Harry’s Spare, with its short sharp RL Stine-esque paragraphs. If this book has taught us anything, it is that in the hands of the wrong writer, the most riveting life becomes slightly less interesting than an economics textbook.
Exceptions to the rule
Please do not let Harry and his ghost-writing ilk put you off. Every once in a while, we fiction lovers are treated to a rare and dazzling example of an autobiography recounted with the mesmerising skill of an award-winning novelist, as Al Pacino’s rather colourful Sonny Boy proved last year.
Meanwhile, no one who has devoured Trevor Noah’s Born A Crime will have complained of boredom after reading his account of nearly losing his mother to a stray bullet or being hurled out of a moving car as a child (“I was nine years old when my mother threw me out of a moving car. It happened on a Sunday.”) If you take away nothing else from this memoir, Noah will have at least confirmed for you that this whole rolling-out-of-a-car charade is not quite as painless as Hollywood heroes would like you to believe.
Of course, if you are in the market for a something that slightly more mundane than car chases and gunfights, you could always sift through Alan Rickman’s collection of diaries (Madly Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries), which definitively proves that Professor Snape’s life has the capacity to be as refreshingly dull as a, well, ours. One diary entry picked at random rather delightfully reads reads as follows: “2PM. Dentist. Bleaching. Ouch. 4PM. Refit the Harry P. costume. A bit of taking in is necessary.”
Not all memoirs can reach the heights that Alan Rickman’s beautifully unadorned diaries aspire to, but here are some additional celebrities whose life stories will make a slow, rainy weekend streak past in the blink of an eye.
Matthew Perry
After Matthew Perry’s tragic death in 2023 broke the heart of every Chandler Bing fan, his unapologetic take on his debilitating drug addiction and ’90s pop culture in Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is a harrowing but gripping read. Opting for the simple touch, Perry began, “Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by my full name. My friends call me Matty.”
Laying himself bare thus, Perry preserved his life for posterity with this trademark Chandler-like sarcasm and self-deprecation. From shuffling between his divorced parents to nearly being a ranked tennis player, from yearning for fame and battling the drugs that failed to fill his hunger for something just beyond reach, Perry gives his own unflinching take of his life and the choices he made. “I have spent upward of $7m trying to get sober. I have been to 6,000 AA meetings I’ve been to rehab fifteen times,” wrote Perry. And whilst Friends fans will already be aware of Perry’s struggles with addiction behind the scenes, reading his own account twists the knife in just a little further. “I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment centre,” he confessed in his memoir, a disquieting reminder that reality is as far away from television as we could possibly imagine.
Britney Spears
There was once a time when it was considered the height of coolness to loathe this blonde pop princess and her Baby One More Time repertoire. Those days have long since passed, as Spears’ painfully honest The Woman In Me has proven. As horrifying accounts of the amount of coercion this once-teenaged idol was put through as a young woman have emerged over the years, we have been taught repeatedly not to judge a book by its cover. Or at least to not judge a woman by the blonde-ness of her hair, or the shallowness of her songs.
“There have been so many times when I was scared to speak up because I was afraid somebody would think I was crazy,” writes Spears. “But I’ve learned that lesson now, the hard way. You have to speak the thing that you’re feeling, even if it scares you. You have to tell your story. You have to raise your voice.”
And so in her short, sharp memoir, Spears’s cautionary tale is yet another harrowing reminder of the drawbacks of living in the public eye. Where once Spears was a sex symbol and a pop icon, her book shows that she is a relatable figure to any adult woman whose life has been dictated by others. This is less of a story about music, and more of an insider’s account of the way women continue to be mistreated in the industry. Far from spinning out a tale of woe, The Woman In Me is a candid eye-opener brimming with (of all things) optimism where it could have justifiably spewed out bitterness.
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