Say it With Me: "Celebrities Do Not Write Their Own Books."

The celebrity memoir epitomizes the logic of publishers--selling the name on the book rather than its content, which is so often banal, and at any rate unlikely to be by the person whose name and face are on the cover anyway.

Why is that? The plain and simple answer is that while idiots do not realize or admit it writing is hard work and a demanding craft--especially at the level of producing anything remotely resembling a publishable book-length manuscript, or even a first draft of one, which is likely to be a very time-consuming activity. The pampered high school drop-outs who make up the Hollywood A-list are unlikely to have the skills to perform the task, the opportunity to go about it if they are constantly out in front of the camera as they seem to be, or the patience to endure the grind even if they really try their hand at it, especially when they can with much greater ease and profit spend their time shilling for their lines of crappy "wellness" products instead as they leave the writing to someone else.

Still, obvious as this all seems, the fact is rarely spoken--indeed, seems to me to be even less spoken than it was back when C. Wright Mills estimated in his classic White Collar that the chances of a book by a "prominent but non-literary" public figure actually having been written by that public figure as no better than "fifty-fifty," and that in an era in which I think it safe to say the odds of famous people really writing their own memoirs were probably a good deal higher than they are today (and this going all the more for the kind of famous people whose books make the lists).