Secret Diary of a Call Girl will premiere on Showtime this summer, based on the anonymous British memoir with the same name, authored by "Belle du Jour." Not to be outdone, HBO and Sex and the City's Darren Star plans to shoot a pilot for former working girl Tracy Quan's novel, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl. Everybody gets paid! [Time]
Memoirists are so screwed: it's gotten to the point where you can't even sleep with tons of prostitutes without having to present a receipt for verification anymore. We already told you how British debauched dandy Sebastian Horsley, author of Dandy in the Underworld, was barred from entering the States for his very own book party, due to his checkered past. Now the NYT is forced, in the wake of a rash of fake memoirists, to contort itself into a variety of amusing positions in order to verify his story! Details on the memoir: "a debauched life of cocaine, heroin, opium and amphetamine use, writing that he spent more than £100,000 (nearly $200,000) on crack cocaine and £100,000 to consort with more than 1,000 prostitutes."
When I was at Jossip, I wrote about an anecdote Malcolm Gladwell told at the Moth Gala last November, which was later rebroadcasted on This American Life. In the story, Gladwell boasts about getting absurd phrases like "raises new and troubling questions" and "perverse and often baffling" into the Washington Post. At the time, being self-serious and high-minded &mdash I do after all listen to This American Life &mdash I wondered whether there wasn't something "perverse and often baffling" about one of the most successful journalists of our time making lite deception sound so endearing . Some people agreed with me, or at least wondered how a Canuck like Gladwell ended up on This American Life. Gladwell is back, not to defend himself for the charges of being Canadian, but to explain the story on his own blog:
"Power lawyer" Bob Bennett (not to be confused with his gambling-addict moralizing Conservative pundit brother Bill, as we sometimes do) uses his memoir to pretend to be a half-Indian South-Central Blood who—no, sorry, he just uses it to trash New York Times editor Arthur Sulzberger, for not helping Bennett's defense of former Times star Judith Miller when she was under indictment for refusing to name which member of the Bush administration leaked CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to the journo. You see, Pinch Sulzberger planned a big party for Judy the night she got out of jail! But Judy had to testify the next day, and attending a fancy party would perhaps be considered bad form. A short time later, Pinch and Bill Keller cut Judy loose (a couple years too late to save face for the paper). If that's the worst the anti-Pinch dirt gets, you are advised to skip the book. [NYDN]
Serious as a sizzler, the strapping stripper is beginning another autobio oh dear lord I can't even keep this up for one sentence. Diablo Cody's writing a second memoir, hopefully to get past the "hey look, the stripper wrote a book" phase of her life, which hadn't disappeared over the years but only became "hey look, the stripper wrote a movie." Good news, really, judging by Juno. I mean think about it: The first act is cloying and fake, but the rest is authentic and artistic. Either way, it should be a lot better than her Entertainment Weekly column.
Remember Tori Spelling? No, not the dead one! That's her bazillionaire TV mogul papa Aaron. Tori is his deformed daughter. Tori is (was?) an actress who played the virginal Donna Martin (who did, in fact, graduate) on daddy's hot show about cool teens in the hot, cool city Beverly Hills 90210 ("Nine-oh" for in-the-know fags and losers). She also had a glorious career in television movies, most famously in the best-titled movie ever made, Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? Well, that's all over now and she was cut her out of her dad's will, so she needs some cash! And what does that almost always mean for nonentity celebrities like Tori and Lance Bass? MEMOIR!!!! Yerp, Tori has written a tome of doubtless grandiloquence that will be hitting the shelves anon. Some selected passages after the jump. The most pleasing? When she says that "Nine-oh" (see?) costar Luke Perry called her "Camel" because of her long eyelashes. Right. That is why he called her camel. It had nothing to do with her looking exactly, in every way possible, like a camel. Oh, Tori.
Tinker, tailor, soldier, fabulist alert! The credibility of A Long Way Gone, the bestselling Farrar, Strauss and Giroux memoir from child soldier Ishmael Beah has been called into question by an Australian couple. It seems Beah may have spent a mere three months-not two years-kidnapped, drugged, running for his life, and watching his friends and entire family be raped and hacked to death. The outrage! Listen here, Ishmael, there will be no getting mixed up, we don't care how much brown-brown they made you take or how heavy your AK-47 was. Our rules about memoirs are very serious.
Guardian writer Julie Burchill wants all middle-class writers to cease writing about their mildly disconcerting childhoods. "Another month, another sob-story; the embellished memories of some poor ickle depressed or alcoholic oofums...who feels a bit miserable and doesn't see any damn reason why the rest of us shouldn't suffer too....I'm referring to the endless stream of books regarding what I call Toytown Traumas; that is, sorrow which is either self-inflicted - drink, drugs, divorce - or which happens to so many of us as not to actually count as anything special: death of a loved one, loss of a job, divorce." She does have a point that it gets tiring reading of the problems of the privileged and reasonably privileged in precious memoir form. On the other hand, there goes Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, Aciman's Out of Egypt and my forthcoming memoir, Growing Up In Suburbia Was Pretty Nice But Sometimes I Got Grounded. [Guardian]
Susanna Sonnenberg is not only the daughter of Ben Sonnenberg, the editor of the now defunct literary journal Grand Street but also the granddaughter of Ben Sonnenberg, a poor boy from Russia who came to New York and hit it big in the PR business. She follows her family's tradition of writing memoirs that revel in the craziness that was life in the House of the Sonnenbergs. Her father published Lost Property: Memoirs & Confessions of a Bad Boy in 1991. Now Baby Sonnenberg published her own Glory Of it Allian memoir, Her Last Death, about her mother. She says she changed names "to emphasize that this story could only be mine" which doesn't make any sense.
It's only a matter of time before socialgay Kristian Laliberte writes his memoir, Give Me Laliberte or Give Me Girth. Until then, we'll have to make do with what scraps of Lalibertian reverie we can find. Now, someone at Guestofaguest took it upon themselves to talk to Laliberte for entirely too long. He does say some fascinating things; still, the ratio of things he says to the words he uses to say them is seriously off. So we've abridged!
Hey, you're probably wondering right now about what's going on at the London Book Fair! Psych. But there is a hot topic over at that trade show: Namely, who are the anonymous agent and "internationally bestselling" author behind a pair of romans a clef entitled Ego and Greed that agent Ali Gunn, who's repping them, says are to the media world "what Primary Colors was to Capitol Hill." She also called Ego "Heart to Heart meets The Devil Wears Prada." Make it stop! But least one editor who's read the 30,000 word submission, which Gunn says she's guarding closely and only showing to a "select group of hand-picked editors," has way less glowing things to say about the book.
On Friday at a little after 5 p.m., the New York Observer posted up a 131-page book proposal by Michael Hastings, a Newsweek Baghdad correspondent. The memoir is about his time overseas and the death of his fiance. The Observer post promptly disappeared. Besides the obvious copyright issues with making the whole shebang available, there was another reason mega-lit agent (and poet!) Andrew Wylie wanted the proposal disappeared from the internet: it was going to get people killed in Iraq.
We got an e-mail from a publicist the other day asking if we'd be interested in spending some time with Jared Fogle, better known as "the Subway guy," in advance of his Rockefeller Center promotion for his new book. (You'd be surprised at what kind of crap publicists think we're interested in; surprised and depressed.) We passed, being pretty much busy whatever day it was happening, but WNYC's Leonard Lopate had fewer reservations. Turns out his instincts were right; Jared makes some shocking revelations. Of course, we could have figured that out had we just taken a look at the cover.
AdRants points us to the blog of Dieste Harmel & Partners' Creative Director Mack Simpson, who has made a horrifying discovery about himself: He's responsible for Koren Zailckas' alcoholism. Turns out Mack was responsible for the campaign behind Tequiza, a beer/tequila product that inexplicably still exists. A friend of his showed him this passage from Zailckas' best-selling memoir Pretty Girl Drank a Lot:
So just how well are those gossip-biz inspired memoirs and novels selling? For the most part, things look bleak — save for MSNBC quasi-gossip Jeanette Walls. The lesson learned: if you're willing to sell out your parents as dumpster divers, you're golden.
