The Loathsome State of Best-Selling Autobiographies

The BBQ Pit
1

I am seized with disbelief and more than a touch of nausea at what passes for hot autobiographies in America these days. Take these instant classics from the N.Y. Times bestseller list, by genre (summaries provided by the Times):

1) The tell-all by a rock musician who probably is so wasted by drugs and groupie excesses that he had to bring in a team of ghostwriters, namely

CLAPTON, by Eric Clapton. (Broadway Books, $26.) The great guitarist looks back on his life and his music.
SLASH, by Slash with Anthony Bozza. (HarperEntertainment, $27.95.) The autobiography of the Guns N’ Roses guitarist.
THE HEROIN DIARIES, by Nikki Sixx with Ian Gittins. (Pocket, $32.50.) The Mötley Crüe bassist’s record of a year of drug addiction.

I could maybe see picking up a celebrity mag for $4 at the supermarket checkout counter for an article on this stuff, but who in their right mind is going to pay $32.50 for a hardcover book on Nikki Sixx’s drug addiction? And while all these tomes are ludicrously overpriced, there also appears to be an inverse correlation between talent and list price, at least as far as Clapton is concerned.

2) "I am still seriously pissed off and am going to get my revenge, but not on all the reviewers who’ll have a grand time mocking me"

MY GRANDFATHER’S SON, by Clarence Thomas. (Harper, $26.95.) A memoir from an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

Thanks, I’ll wait until it’s available at the library. Or more probably, until the library gives it away along with other fascinating titles like “The Year In Chemistry 1958”.

3) What to take when the Ambien fails:

THE AGE OF TURBULENCE, by Alan Greenspan. (Penguin Press, $35.) A memoir by the longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

Second choice for sleepless nights, an audiotape: “Fred Thompson Reads Shakespeare”.

4) Let’s cash in on the Super Bowl while we can.

QUIET STRENGTH, by Tony Dungy with Nathan Whitaker. (Tyndale, $26.99.) A memoir by the first black coach to win a Super Bowl (with the Indianapolis Colts in 2007).

I can’t believe this has remained on the bestseller list so long. Aside from diehard Colts fans and Dungy’s family, who is shelling out for this book?

5) No Super Bowl win, but my hubby is having a good year.

DON’T BET AGAINST ME!, by Deanna Favre and Angela Elwell Hunt. (Tyndale House, $22.99.) An inspirational memoir about her battle with breast cancer by the wife of the Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre.

Well, maybe it’s not as inane as Jenny McCarthy’s book.
Man, what a load of crapola. If this is all I have to choose from for Mrs. J’s Xmas gift, I’ll have to resort to the grab-bag selection at Big Bob’s House of Reptiles.

2

Inasmuch as Clapton has been clean and sober for nearly 20 years, and has started drug & alcohol treatment centers, I think it is unfair to lump him in with wasted druggies.

3

My pet peeve is autobiography by star athletes while they are still in the middle of their careers. Hey douchebag wait until you have retired to tell us about your life as a HoF quarterback or whatever, because I think you are unclear on the concept-YOUR STORY IS NOT OVER YET!

4

While I agree in principle, I’m sure Bret Favre’s wife has a trilogy in her. Or maybe one book for each breast?

C’mon, these people are doing this for the money. They’re told that tens of thousands of mouth breathing fans will line up and pay, and the advice seems to be right.

Hey, if I could get a hundred or 2 hundred grand, maybe more, for having a book about my wasted life written by ghost writers, I would do it in a second. So would almost anyone.

5

If any single one person can be blamed, it might be Judith Regan (of OJ “If I Did It” infamy), who went against the conventional publishing wisdom that people wouldn’t buy autobiographies that were essentially puffed-out People Magazine articles.

6

How about that book by Bill Plaschke and Tommy Lasorda? I Live for This! No idea if it’s any good, but it might be worth looking into.

7

Having actually read Bill Plaschke’s “journalism,” i wouldn’t touch that book with a forty-foot barge pole. He’s a god-awful writer, and appears also to not actually know very much about baseball.

I remember reading somewhere once that, in order to appear on the non-fiction best-seller list, a book often has to sell surprisingly few copies. Americans not only tend to read less non-fiction than fiction, but when they do read non-fiction their interests tend to be very diverse. Few works of non-fiction have the sort of massive appeal of a J.K. Rowling or Stephen King or John Grisham book.

Also, works of non-fiction about sports tend to draw fans that might not be especially concerned about the literary merits of the work, but who seek a new “insider’s” view of the team. Combine this with the enduring popularity of autobiography and biography as a genre, and add in the fact that sales figures are often heavily influenced by publishers’ marketing campaigns, and you get an atmosphere in which a lot of dreck appears on the best-seller lists.

8

A couple of comments about price. I don’t really see that they’re overpriced, as long as we’re talking hardcover editions. If you want to talk about why hardcover books, in general are running $25 to $30 a pop, that’s one thing. But to complaing that these autobiographies are overpriced when they’re in the normal price range for hardcovers, it just doesn’t make much sense.

For the inverse relationship between talent and price - I think you’re looking at the wrong relationship: It’s an inverse relationship between prospective market and price. The smaller the market for a given book, generally the higher the individual copies are going to cost. I grant it’s only a general rule, and doesn’t fit if you take it all the way to one extreme or the other. But it does explain, to my mind, why a book for an artist who has been popular for ages, and has sufficient name recognition that even I know who he is, is going to be cheaper than a book by an artist that I’ve barely heard of, or one whom I’ve never heard of at all.

9

Oh yeah, like you’d know anything about writing! :wink:

Seriously, the publishing industry has been shit for a couple of decades now, with the big chains blaming the publishers for the problems, and the publishers blaming the big chains. Most of these “instant books” don’t make any serious money for the publishers. The idea with them is that they “draw people” into the book stores, make the editors look good, and enable them to land other high profile “authors” that they’ll hopefully be able to make a buck off of.

Generally, what happens with most of these books is they wind up being “remaindered.” Which means that a portion of the hardbacks are marked down to a pittance of their original cover price (and what they’re really worth paying for), another portion has the hardbacks removed, and a paper cover glued on, making them “tradeback books” and the rest are shredded and thrown out.

Huge amounts of money (and fuel) are simply wasted by the book industry shipping books from publisher to distributor to store, and then back to the distributor, out to another store, or back to the publisher. Back when I was working for Waldenbooks in one of their distribution centers, I reboxed some 70K copies of Nancy Reagan’s My Turn during the three months I handled processing returns to the warehouse. Og only knows how many of them they actually ordered.

10

Presumably these clowns get a hefty chunk of change to write (or have ghostwritten) this dreck, and wouldn’t be overly concerned about what happens to the actual copies.

Without the name recognition, one is forced to actually write an intelligible manuscipt. I am working on mine – not an autobiography – but if I get it published, perhaps the next thing I write will be an autobiographical account of writing the first thing, as I will be desperate for material and wanting to strike while the iron is hot.

Ya know, with a little re-working, that sentence right up there would be prety good material to submit for next year’s Bulwer Lytton contest. :stuck_out_tongue:

11

You missed Ronnie Wood’s autobiography, the imaginatively titled Ronnie. He could have at least called it I, Ronnie.

12

Stuff like “Slash” and “The Heroin Diaries” would be overpriced no matter what medium we’re talking about. Even for people who find their lives interesting, it’s hard to imagine plunking down that much dough when you could wait for paperback or just watch them on Larry King.

Alright, my autobiography, “Dancing Naked At Tumor Board” is gonna go on the market for $5 million a copy.

All I have to do is sell just one…

13

I doubt this is inside Tony’s book, but I was told by one of his former players that when Dungy fired him, he said that Tony and his wife prayed about the decision and found that he had to be fired. He was quite funny in the telling of it. Joking about how God wanted him off the team. How was he supposed to argue THAT point?

I’m thinkin’ that ain’t in Tony’s book.

Sadly, I would bet my sister in law will by the Nikki Sixx one. I sometimes feel she is the reason those things are published at all. She reads all of them.

Has Dean Kamen written an autobiography yet? Now there is one I’d read.

14

Those books might all suck for all I know, but I do have to recommend Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis. It WAS written with the help of a ghostwriter (though after reading it I would say that it was probably truly a collaborative effort and not one guy just totally doing all the work.) And the “ghostwriter” in this case is Larry Sloman , well respected for his biography of Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Dream, which I have read and enjoyed, as well as many other counterculture-related writings. Though I’m very biased since I’m a huge RHCP fan, I think the book was amazing. Reading about the formation of the Chili Peppers and the development of their early work with Hillel Slovak, beginning with Anthony, Flea and Hillel becoming friends as young teenagers and then getting active in the L.A. punk rock scene was especially fun for me since I’m mostly a fan of their earlier work. It was also fascinating to read about all the different guitarists and drummers they went through before settling with Frusciante and Chad - you get to meet loads of memorable characters.

There are some annoying mistakes - near the end of the book he refers to his Cadillac “Esplanade” (how could they not catch that one?!) and he talks maybe a little too much about his heroin problem (one page he’s off it, the next he’s using again, repeat, repeat, repeat) but overall it’s a really great book.

15

Most of my reading is of library books, not purchased ones, so the list price of hard-cover books is not an issue that affects me directly. I read Clapton recently (from the library) and enjoyed it thoroughly. Because he is not an experienced writer, it seems obvious to me that the book was worked on extensively by an editor, but the writing seemed to be his. I base this on an interview he did on Larry King. His answers on that show seemed, in structure and word choice, to be very similar to the style of the book. I guess this could have been the result of him studying his own ghost-written book, but I thought that it was evidence that he might have written the thing himself. Is his autobiography known to have been ghost-written?

16

Yes, Clapton did indeed write the book himself (though like you said, it was likely polished by an editor). Clapton has said, IIRC, that he didn’t like the original ghost-written version–that it seemed to blame his problems too much on others and so he decided to chuck it and write the book himself. He also alludes to typing the book in a two-fingered style and he mentions spending considerable time working on it while on tour in Japan.

It was a pretty good book, actually. I was surprised.

17

Believe it or not, a lot of Bucs fans and others in the Tampa Bay area admire him a great deal for his dignity, dedication, and community involvement, and would probably enjoy reading his book. I won’t rush right out and buy it, but if I get an opportunity to read it? I probably will.

I have no interest in any of the others you’ve listed.

18

Clapton has a reputation as someone who has his nose in a book continually, and to have very catholic reading tastes. He wasn’t someone who excelled academically at school and I’ve never thought of his lyrics as being that special, but I’ve often heard it said that to write well you need to read a lot. It doesn’t surprise me that he’d be capable of stringing a sentence together.

19

All books (save crappy self-published efforts) are polished by an editor. That’s kind of what editors do.

I don’t read celebrity autobiographies. I just don’t expect them to be that interesting or honest or introspective. Does anyone expect Tony Dungy to explore the ways that his homophobia might have contributed to his son’s suicide? No more than his star quarterback faced up to the fact that shoving his asshole in a woman’s face is basically rape.

20

Agreed. And I’ll take it a step further and say that I don’t care for autobiographies in general, as no matter how fascinating the individual, they inevitably come off as annoyingly self-serving. Out of the genre as a whole I find childhood reminisces usually are about the least objectionable.

That said someone like Clapton is certainly deserving of an objective biography.