Lauren Conrad, 25-year-old former MTV reality television star, is going to write for Forbes and it pisses me off.
She already has 4 books under her belt. Better yet: One is "loosely-based" on her life, about a protagonist who moves to LA and stars in a reality television show focusing on her personal life. It's on the NYT Best Seller List.
Good God where do I begin? I'm going to take a brief break to let my brain be overwhelmed by all the wrong before I even try to tackle it.
*wakes up five hours later, noticeably stupider as a result of this thought process*
I could start with our peculiar fascination with celebrity writing, and our willingness to read any experiences (real, fictional, fictionalized, or otherwise) they take the time to regurgitate, with the help of countless ghost writers and developmental editors revising beyond all recognition. Sometimes, it makes sense. When the story is fascinating enough, we want to know it, and it doesn't particularly matter if Marilyn Monroe herself crafted each bit of prose. My roommate articulated it perfectly when she handed me a copy of Tina Fey's
Bossypants: "For what it is, it's done well."
Sometimes, it's done
fantastically well: One of my students spent the last 3 weeks of school reading
The Heroin Diaries by Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx, and much of what he showed me blew me away: It's an intricately-crafted multigenre journey through the artist's descent into heroin-driven music-infused madness. It is heartbreaking, beautiful, twisted and genius, and the best part is that there's no separation between the story, the star that wrote it, and the book my student held in his hands. I'm sure Sixx had help. But it's clear throughout that the events in his life influenced the way he told the story much more than any editor.
We love fame. It's a fact. Reality TV and the internet have only made it worse. Now, in addition to watching our favorite stars banter wittily on late-night talk shows, we can watch them get gas, order coffee, get the mail, and stumble out of night-clubs half-cocked on tequila. Plus we can comment! Leann Rhimes is too skinny! No she's not! Yes! No! Yes! No! OH MY GOD, STOP EVERYTHING. Wanting to read our favorite stars' memoirs is a natural next step (even though some, like comic book franchises, live on for decades, reinvented so many times we lose our ability to distinguish fact from fiction, evidence from interpretation).
I get it, I really do. Famous people are intriguing. If they're famous, clearly, they are in some way interesting, because why else would people know who they are? Built-in interest. Built-in audience.
Here's my question: Where does it end? Who's in charge of quality control? Someone has to stand up and say, "Okay, guy who pretended his child was missing in a hot-air balloon for the sole purpose of getting national media attention, as manipulative and deceitful as you are, being a douchebag doesn't automatically guarantee you a publishing deal."
NOTE: As of now, balloon-man has not been offered any such publishing deal. I am merely predicting that it will happen in the future.
Regular people can't just "try on" being famous actors. It doesn't work that way. In fact, many people spend their whole lives trying to be successful actors and never make it.
Why should famous people be able to "try on" being successful authors? We're perpetuating a system in which, once you're famous, you can do anything you want and still succeed (I say succeed in the loosest sense of the word, because while I'm not sure one could describe Snookie's memoir as a success artistically, it probably succeeded financially).
It's also making it more difficult for everyone else in the process, non-famous writers who don't have purposely-leaked sex tapes to boost their notoriety. Hundreds of thousands of books get rejected every year. Jay Asher's
Thirteen Reasons Why was rejected from a dozen publishers before becoming a runaway hit that's just now, four years later, being released in paperback for the first time. His book is more important than a fictionalized memoir of a privileged southern California teen.
I'm not saying Lauren Conrad's life was smooth sailing. We all have our battles, money doesn't solve problems, and everyone's life is twisted in some way. Lauren Conrad is no exception. In fact, if done well, her memoir could be fantastic. She is actually quite interesting. She uses her reality TV fame to get opportunities in the fashion world she wouldn't ordinarily have, but because of that, she can't be taken seriously as a designer. No matter what does, people care more about her love life. Here's someone who's trying to matter, using all the tools at her disposal, but she can't rise above the fame that got her there. She's forced to play into the bullshit to stay relevant, which destroys her credibility, because there's a book in Border's that's "loosely-based on her real-life struggles as a reality television star." That is messed up. That is interesting.
That is NOT what she writes about.
Imagine all the time publishing houses would have if they weren't focusing so much on bullshit celebrity memoirs. People go to Jay Asher's book signings and say, "I thought I was the only one who felt that way. I didn't go through with it, because I read your book, and it changed me." Imagine if publishers had more time and energy to spend finding manuscripts that evoke those kinds of reactions, rather than copyediting chapters where Jersey Shore star Snookie describes a friend going topless by writing, "She set her girls loose." A part of me wishes Snookie sat at her laptop agonizing over the diction and syntax decisions in that sentence, crafting and recrafting until her language was precise and powerful, her message resonant:
Sample Thought Process for Snookie: Girls, breasts, boobs? Set lose, freed, unleashed? Is unleashed too strong a word? Does it imply that they were chained? Ooh, maybe they were chained, but by the reestrictive bra that barely contained all their narrative power! Yes! NABOKOV WOULD BE SO PROUD OF ME RIGHT NOW.
Let's be honest: That didn't happen. So why is her memoir on the front shelf at Barnes&Nobles? I can guarantee at least 20 of my students could write memoirs that would blow you away, knock you down, kick you in the gut and make you laugh until you cried.
OH MY GOD.
OH MY GOD.
OH MY GOD.
The past three lines are an epiphany I had while writing this. I will explore that more later.
For now, Snookie, I have some advice for you. Go on doing what you do best: drinking, tweeting, brawling, whining, and making us all feel less guilty about the massive amounts of time we spent inebriated in college because hey... at least we weren't THAT BAD.
Leave the publishing to the rest of us.
