Former NYT managing editor Gerald Boyd lost his job after the Jayson Blair scandal, which could be interpreted either as just desserts for snoozing while Blair fucked up the paper, or as an unjustified bit of scapegoating—made worse by the fact that Boyd was black, and the NYT wasn't exactly swarming with minority execs at the time (or ever!).
Mob princess Victoria Gotti ran into a bit of financial trouble a few months ago and almost lost control of her gaudy mansion on Long Island, as you may recall. We're guessing it was the stack of bills piling up on her white marble coffee table that led her to sign a deal earlier this year to pen a book about her, uh, rather interesting life, especially since she'd backed out of a deal to write a similar "tell-all memoir" a couple of years earlier in order "protect" her family's "reputation." But the financial crisis changed all that and Gotti's book, This Family of Mine, arrived in bookstores this week.
"Steve Jobs has started writing a book," a plugged-in tipster tells me. It's the barest of rumors, but the book industry is already eagerly anticipating the Apple CEO's autobiography.
You know what's next for any lame duck president: the inevitable post-presidency memoir. Only problem, other than the fact that he struggles with basic grammar and syntax: Bush is a hugely unpopular outgoing president, and most of the country hates him. Publishers are wondering what the market for a potential Bush memoir would be, and the consensus is: um, awkward! No publisher is clamoring to give him $15 million like they did Clinton; certainly "the foreign rights interest will be considerably less," says the SF Chronicle. How have other unpopular presidents handled their memoirs?The current wait-time from moving out of the White House to publishing a book appears to be about two years. Taking into consideration the time it takes to write (or ghostwrite) a book and put it through the slow publishing process suggests that most presidents have gotten their book deals right after leaving office. Here's what past unpopular presidents did with their memoirs:
Here's another book about how much it sucks to be a single thirty-something woman in New York! But before you yawn, this one has a semi-original twist: When the author, Anita Jain, whose parents brought her to the US from India when she was a baby, decided to give up on finding love in the Big Apple, she returned to her birthplace where "marriages are routinely arranged by parents and extended family." Now there's an idea: when you've run out of options on Match.com, you can always consider returning to tactics of the Middle Ages!
The Times vetted the hell out of Kate Brennan, who's written In His Sights, "one of the first full-length memoirs of a stalking victim." In the wake of fake memoirists—JT Leroy, James Frey, and Margaret Selzter (whose book they reviewed favorably before the jig was up)—one just can't be too careful these days! Because Kate's stalker is bug-fucking-crazy and has been stalking her for ten years, she lives and gives interviews under assumed names. She also gives her stalker "Paul" a different name in her book. However, the Times needed to check all of this out for reals in her profile:
How does David Carr pull this off? The Times media critic writes in his forthcoming memoir of drug addiction that he kidnapped his children, smacked around his girlfriends and left two babies in a near-freezing car on the street for hours while he got high. This in addition to dealing drugs and fathering crack babies, which we already knew about. It's all in his book excerpt from next Sunday's Times Magazine. And yet, after reading the account, it's remarkably hard to detest the guy.
Not content with inflicting her ubiquitious presence on the world with TV shows, endless cookbooks, irritating neologisms, indiscriminate endorsements, and inadvertent support of the PLO, Rachael Ray is now writing a memoir, reveals E!'s Ted Casablanca, who makes no bones about his utter disdain for Ms. Ray and her endeavors. EVOhno is what she wants to call the tale of how she went from Macy's salesgirl to loved-and-loathed multimillionairess, according to a source at her publisher, who also gripes that Ray is "really difficult to work with and misses deadlines." Hopefully in exchange for the aggravation and the fat advance that's no doubt being paid, Little Miss Yum-o will be forced to dish the real dirt about her life, prostitute-patronising husband, rumored plastic surgery and all.
Now that James Frey is shilling his new novel, a screenwriter who walked the picket line during last fall's strike wrote in to share his experience with Frey, who "showed up to carry a sign and (I suspect) generally be seen. A female writer saw him and truly didn't recognize him at all. Here was the exchange that happened..."
We haven't read it yet (somebody please send!), but the NYT has totally fallen in love with reformed lying-memoirst James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning, set in Los Angeles. Times critic Janet Maslin writes, "His publisher called it a dazzling tour de force. (Look, somebody had to, if only to create a comeback drama)... But that wasn't so far off the mark..." It's the "captivating urban kaleidoscope that, most recently, Charles Bock's 'Beautiful Children' was supposed to be." And what else?
The ladies of The View had a lengthy meta-conversation all about the "very beautiful!" and "sexy!" photos of their own Barbara Walters in this month's Vanity Fair. And while they do point out the photo spread's accompanying excerpt from Walters' new memoir Auditions, and Babs does allude to tales of past "lovahs," she fails to mention (until Oprah makes her next week) just how tantalizing some of those pages are. As today's preview in the NY Daily News reveals, Walters was involved in a long-term affair with an African-American senator back in the swingin' 70s. And from the sound of it, the affair was far spicier than all those Adrian Lyne movies about adultery:
