The new trend of celebrity memoirs and carefully orchestrated “leaks” Worthy Jada Pinkett Britney Spears memoir

Way before its release, the most excerpted portions from pop star Britney Spears’s memoir, ‘The Woman In Me’, were about her first sleepover with singer Justin Timberlake.
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Before last week, everything I learned about American actor and talk show host Jada Pinkett Smith’s life (and especially her marriage to actor Will Smith), I learned against my will. You see, earlier in the year, we were told that Jada’s memoir is in the pipeline, complete with her views on ‘Slapgate’ — when Will slapped actor Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars after the latter made fun of Jada’s shaved head (she suffers from alopecia) — and other revelations. 

Since then, the publishers have followed the standard PR protocol for celebrity memoirs: maintain a drip-feed of carefully chosen “leaks” from the book, the more straightforwardly ‘scandalous’ the better. Jada sold drugs as a teenager, she had checked out of her marriage with Will long before he knew it, she considered the late rapper Tupac Shakur “her soulmate” (Shakur was killed in 1996, while both he and Jada were in their 20s), and so on.

Eventually, of course, I succumbed and read Worthy, Jada’s memoir. I also read The Woman in Me, pop singer Britney Spears’ memoir, after reading several long excerpts from the book over the past months. A similar modus operandi was followed by some of the other celebrity memoirs this year, including Prince Harry’s Spare, Paris Hilton’s Paris and Patrick Stewart’s Making it So.

Last year, I had read Jessica Simpson’s Open Book under similar circumstances, after being fed tidbit after tidbit, all released on a tight schedule, no doubt.

90s’ tabloid culture 

In all of these cases, the excerpted or leaked bits were almost incidental to the crux of the narrative. Spears’s book is about losing one’s autonomy, and the ignominy of losing it to a trusted family member. Simpson’s book is largely about the tabloid culture of the 90s, and how it chewed up and spat out young, female stars like herself. And while Jada’s Worthy is too rambling and scattered to stick to a few key themes, it tries to follow the ‘Hollywood cautionary tale’ template. Some of the most interesting, and entertaining, bits in the book never made it to the press tour, which is a shame.

Actors Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith at the 2022 Oscars.
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Like, at one point, Jada talks about how anti-Blackness is hardwired into Hollywood, so much so that even people complimenting her for her looks would insist that she had “a little mixed blood” in there somewhere. When she said her mother was “one hundred per cent West Indian”, a Hollywood executive latched onto it and said, “Ha! There’s that Indian blood in you”, not realising that they were talking about two different ethnicities.

“Ringing in my ears all the time were my aunt Karen’s words about never speaking on the mixed blood anywhere in my bloodline. She’d emphasize that people would always try to use that influence in your background as an excuse for why you had any appealing quality at all, even if the one relative from another race was from three generations ago. ‘They’ll never want to give your Blackness credit, Jada. Don’t let them do that.’”

The most affecting moments from Britney Spears’s book are her accounts of her spiralling mental health.
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Similarly, the most excerpted portions from Spears’s book have to do with when she lost her virginity, her first sleepover with Justin Timberlake, or the fact that she had an abortion while she was with him (he didn’t want to be a father). In reality, though, the most affecting and genuinely poignant moments from the book are Spears’s account of her spiralling mental health — the same is true for Jada and Simpson’s memoirs. In Spears’s case, imagine being 20 and already jaded and a little traumatised from 5-6 solid years of a whole nation sexualising you non-stop.

“I’d been the good girl for years. I’d smiled politely while TV show hosts leered at my breasts, while American parents said I was destroying their children by wearing a crop top. And I was tired of it.”

Paparazzi scare

When you read people like Spears and Simpson on the topic, you begin to wonder how we allowed the no-holds-barred tabloid culture of the 90s and the 2000s to go on so long — even after Princess Diana’s tragic death, which happened in a car accident as she fled a relentless paparazzi in Paris. In one chapter, Simpson lists the most weird, intrusive and downright humiliating interview questions she ever received in the 2000s, and any one of them can plausibly get a reporter fired today (and rightly so).

In the Indian context as well, revisiting Bollywood interviews from the 90s and the early 2000s is an unpleasant experience. The questions range from the mildly sexist to the downright lecherous (the talk show Movers and Shakers was a recurring culprit).

One big reason why celebrity memoirs are expected to be extra ‘scandalous’ today — and why so many of them fail to be that way — is the post-Instagram grammar of celebrity social media interaction. On the networking app, celebrities now talk directly to their fans, to their “hives”. Every detail of their lives is seemingly up for consumption, regardless of its mundanity. 

In fact, mundanity is part of the point. In our rush to see our favourite stars eating with their hands, or being clumsy around the kitchen, or waiting in queue at the airport, we have sacrificed a lot of the glamour and intrigue that used to be inextricable from the idea of a celebrity. Dilip Cherian, ‘image guru’ and founder of Perfect Relations PR, thinks it’s a trade-off. “My view is that the oversharing era has definitely made celebrities much more ‘relatable’. What’s been lost is a bit of mystique but what’s been gained is a lot of traction. This is an age when the number of engagements and followers determines how popular a celebrity is.”

No wonder, then, that big publishers are pushing their celebrity clients to be more risqué and outspoken than ever before — and to hold on to a few choice titbits, without revealing them all on Insta Reels.

One can’t leak what one has already yelled into the panopticon, after all.

The writer and journalist is working on his first book of non-fiction.