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Vice Blog

HOW TO WRITE YOUR CELEBRITY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

If there is a more Christmas-y sound on God's earth than the "whumpf" of ghost-written, stocking-stuffing celeb autobiographies landing on the "New Arrivals" table at Barnes & Noble, then I haven't heard it. That "whumpf" has provided the soundtrack for every British Christmas since time immemorial, and today the market for their life stories is valued at roughly a fucking shit ton. The average Briton spends at least £ a year on celebrity memoirs. It is truly a lucrative market. No one should have to miss out on the chance to write theirs. Go on. Give it a go.

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What title should I choose for my book?

Mathematicians calculate that there are only a dozen titles in the English language that convey the sense that you are a person telling the story of your life. So just get on with it and pick one of these.

• That's Life
• My Story
• My Way
• The Whole Truth
• You Only Live Once
• Let Me Tell You
• My Life As The Stig
• The Real Me

Sometimes you can vary these stock options a bit, depending on your circumstances.

For example:

My Life So Far
Are you a comedian? Then how about:
My Crazy Life So Far

My Journey
Are you quite old? How about:
Journey Of A Lifetime

If you have a particular speciality, there may be mileage in a few stock puns, too.

Footballer The Score, or Winning At Home.
Referee or umpire – Man In The Middle.
Boxer – Hitting Back.
Captain Ahab – Whale Of A Time.
Etc.

Childhood

We were all young once. Unfortunately most of us weren't called 'Ryan Giggs', so all the petty details of our boring provincial lives of Lazer Quest and boozeless, same-sex sleepovers have remained unfairly hidden from the world's view.

Your life isn't like that, obviously. You're a big-shot now. So every bout of fisticuffs with Oliver behind the woodwork shop and fingering of Olivia behind the bike shed is now vested with significance. It shows the development of your character. Notice, though, that the fallacy of causation only really works if you are famous. If you are not, then it was all just "stuff that happened."

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Witness:

"In those long summer hours at Lazer Quest, I realized that the competitive spirit that drove me to victory then would spur me on to ever-greater heights. Indeed, that same basic mettle still drives me to do yet another deal in the boardroom today." YES.

Versus:

"In those long summer hours at Lazer Quest, I realized that the telesales team at PC World would be the most fitting destination for my general air of apathy – an easy life of noncommittal relationships and Xbox workouts. It proved prophetic." NO.

The Father

The character of the father will, as ever, be the mirror in which your own personal growth is revealed. You should be defined either a) as driven by a burning desire for his unrequited affection all your life, or b) of desperately wanting to be everything he wasn't. Accordingly, his own character should be either a) rugged and manly, or b) feckless and swinish.

Good
Strict.
Drunk.
Never there.
Taught us the value of hard work.
A miner.

Bad
Sat us down for regular "feelings audit."
Told me I probably didn't have to join the football team if I really didn't want to.
Diversity Delivery Facilitator for North Eastern Regional Development Agency quango.
On the board of BAE Systems.
Reiki therapist.

I am a celebrity who also had a very bad childhood. Should I simply combine my childhood misery-memoir with my celebrity memoir?

No. These are two quite separate beasts. The childhood misery memoir should be titled Daddy, No, or Daddy, Why Won't Mummy Get Up, or Not Tonight, Daddy, I Have A Headache, or Daddy, Why Are You Strapping Me To A Barrel Of Gelignite And Then Running Back Behind That Small Cluster Of Buildings In The Near Distance. That sort of thing. These books should always have a white cover, with the faded face of a sad child protruding enigmatically through the gloom. By contrast, the cover of a celebrity autobiography should always feature the celeb themselves, against a coloured background, with a bold red and white sticker that says: "'Heartwarming, discombobulating, and disarmingly candid' - Stephen Fry."

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Should I employ a ghost-writer?

There's certainly no shame in employing a ghost-writer. After all, do you think George Orwell actually wrote Down & Out In Paris And London? No. He hived it off to some workie after a series of lengthy interviews and went back to doing impressions of various tramps for his pals down at The Garrick Club.

How it works is the ghost writer will come round to your house with a tape recorder and ask you about your life, then staple all of these interviews together into one flowing bit of text, throwing in some of your personal tics every five lines or so. If you are Alan Sugar, they will get MS Word to insert: "the bleedin idjut" at random intervals. If you are William Hague, "now then, now then," and so on. It is the fine art of personalization for which they earn their big bucks.

Addiction

We all have addictions. And if we don't, and we want to publish a celebrity autobiography, then we've got a problem on our hands, don't we sunshine? Addictions are great. Not only will it make you look glamorous, an addiction will also make you look human. It will give people the little burst of schadenfreude they need in-between looking up your shiny sun-encrusted bottom all the bloody time, eh? The more brave amongst you may want to start the whole narrative with you sitting in an AA meeting. You--the big star. Everyone else--workaday slobs. But get this: you're all on the same level now--humbled before your problem. IRONY! As your turn comes to speak, the words track your internal monologue: "What was I doing here? How had I become this person?" FLASHBACK! Now spend the next 200 pages answering this rhetorical question…

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Good addictions
Crack.
Womanizing.
Plastic surgery.
Violent porn.
Money.

Bad addictions
Ritz crackers.
Popping the blisters on bubble-wrap.
Badminton.
Cryptic crosswords.
Magic FM.

Denouement

Once you've been through the dirt-poor childhood in rural Ireland, the starting of your business from the back of a Ford Cortina, the evening you spent in Annabel's with Cassius Clay, the fourth and fifth wives, the triumph of New Labour, the Jonathan Ross incident and the papal conclave, then the whole thing should arrive at some kind of bogus insight to round it out; to make it look as though your life was simply an algorithm that finally summed to the here and now. It all made sense, and now some big computational moment of realization can square-off all of the 300 pages of turgid bilge that came before it.

Witness:
"And it was then that I realized…
• "…that you can't win 'em all."
• "…that you've got to just keep smiling through the pain."
• "…that history would remember the Iraq War as a triumph even though we didn't find a single WMD."
• "…that there would still be plenty more crap for Amstrad to sell in the future."
• "…that being Michael McIntyre was a blessing as well as a curse."
• "…that black people and white people are the same people."

Merry Christmas, autobiographers.

GAVIN HAYNES