From Julius Caesar to Paris Hilton and Prince Harry, the perks of being a memoirist

Intimate confessions can never go out of fashion, especially if peppered with a scandal or two. Scarcely has one celebrity stopped blabbing, another one starts. Talk shows owe their TRPs to this insatiable curiosity on the audience’s part for the simply outrageous. And spilling the beans about oneself is an ego trip no one can resist. Ever since Julius Caesar wrote Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries on the Gallic Wars), personal experiences are being typed up faster than we can read. But not everyone is a Joan Didion, able to convert a year of their life with magical thinking.

Annie Ernaux may have won the Nobel Prize for her personal memories, and we have had touching books like I Want to Destroy Myself (Malika Amar Shaikh) and A Life Less Ordinary (Baby Halder), but that honesty and willingness to transcend the page is not the norm. Most memoirists set out to rewrite their past, turning the medium overbright and brittle.

You may think the title of Paris Hilton’s book – Paris: The Memoir – says it all, but it takes 336 pages in hardcover for her to tell the whole story. And though she says, ‘I’m not pretending to be, like, the Dalai Lama in Louboutins,’ there is some amount of self-regard in her words: ‘There are so many young women who need to hear this story.’ A socialite, influencer, reality star, Paris now gets to add ‘author’ to the other prefixes.

Prince Harry, whose book Spare caused a media frenzy, has a bestseller on his hands. Whatever the reason people bought it – to make fun, curiosity, to review – buy it they did. And out came tumbling sibling rivalry, first-time coitus, labelling stepmom Camilla ‘dangerous’... Naturally, a parody follows. Spare Us! A Harrody written by Bruno Vincent is set to be out on April 1. It is described as ‘a frostbite-and-all book’, referencing Harry’s account of his frostbitten todger, which also had a cameo in the South Park episode satirizing Harry and Meghan.