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Those of you who were waiting with bated breath for Amanda Knox and ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito to pen dueling memoirs will rejoice at the news that both have acquired literary agents. According to TMZ, Knox has signed with Robert Barnett, who has also represented a bipartisan slate of political memoirists including Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. Sollecito, meanwhile, will be working with Sharlene Martin, who represents such authors as Debra Barrus, author of From Mormon to Madame, which "reveals her trials and tribulations in the dating world and in relationships with controlling and abusive men, her entry into the brothel business, her battle with her dishonest business partner and her struggle — aided by two female veterans of the industry — in making the bordello a rousing success." Somehow, we bet Sollecito's book will be more fun. More »
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Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has written a book. Unfortunately, much of that book tries to justify all that lying the Bush administration did to get us into Iraq. Fortunately, she spends some of the book indulging the public's desire to learn about how everyone in the Bush White House was behind closed doors. Here's what Condi had to say on what went right, what went wrong, and what went weird. More »
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Next year the British publisher of Anne Frank's diary will release a diary by Helga Weiss, one of the few children from the Czech ghetto of Terezin who survived Auschwitz. Weiss, who grew up to be an internationally known artist, was confronted by Josef Mengele in the camps, but managed to save herself and her mother by convincing guards that she was older and her mother was much younger. More »
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Considering that the lion's share of her memoir, The Real Girl Next Door, is about her life with ex-husband Charlie Sheen, Denise Richards really could've raked his ass over the coals for what he put her through. But unfortunately for us—and her publisher—she chose to take the high road, never divulging the details of his crazy free-basing antics and penchant for prostitutes (these issues are vaguely referred to in blanket terms like "addiction" or "deep dark revelations"). Luckily, though, Sheen proves to be a such bountiful source of eccentricities that Richards does manage to disclose some weirdo facts worth mentioning here, like his bachelor pad of hyper-paranoia. More »
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1. That week in 1975 she "disappeared" with Bob Marley. More »
]]> http://jezebel.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5820079&view=rss&microfeed=true Julian Assange said he hoped his memoirs "would become one of the unifying documents of our generation." That'll have to wait: The book's been postponed until further notice, because Assange is afraid of the contents being used against him legally. More »
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If you're in the market for a truly inspiring memoir this year, you're in luck — Jesse James reportedly has a deal with Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The book will apparently come out later this year, so you only have a few months to wait for James's wisdom. More »
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Call me old-fashioned, but I've always believed a certain degree of discretion — or, really, confidentiality — should prevail in professions like gynecology, drugstore clerking and bikini waxing. And now I'm thinking this should extend to bra-fitting. More »
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Rachel Shukert's new memoir Everything Is Going To Be Great does something unfortunately rare in women's writing: celebrating mistakes. More »
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Ready for another "coming-of-age" memoir? Well, since this one grows in a Bronx housing project and becomes a Supreme Court Justice, we are. Sonia Sotomayor just signed a book deal with Knopf for an as-yet-untitled memoir. More »
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Well, that was quick. Sarah Brown, wife of former British PM Gordon, has announced that she's penning "a behind-the-scenes memoir about life at 10 Downing St." It's tentatively titled Behind the Black Door, and due out in March. [Yahoo] More »
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The title Lonely tends to conjure up words like shy, sad, and withdrawn, so it's something of a surprise that Emily White has written an impassioned call to arms on behalf of a condition no one wants to talk about. More »
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Extraordinary, Ordinary People — Condoleezza Rice's first of two memoirs — will be released in October. The book will discuss her family and mentors — readers will have to wait for the sequel for shoe-shopping tips during natural disasters. [NYT] More »
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Jenny Sanford's book will be released on February 5th, a month earlier than expected, her publishers announced. And Ballantine Books has posted a lengthy synopsis of Staying True, the "candid and compelling memoir" of Sanford's "very public betrayal." [CNN, NYDN] More »
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The news may be full of prominent men who couldn't keep it in their pants — but one Wall Street Journal writer thinks it's women's lips that need zipping. Because the real problem with modern marriage is the female overshare. More »
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Serial memoirist Mary Karr has a new book out, and in a Double X interview she shares some interesting insights about women's autobiographical writing — and some annoying shit about how much god likes her. More »
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As mentioned earlier, the cover of Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue was released today. Since we don't yet have access to the idiocy that lies beneath, we decided to take a closer look at the cover, from an artistic perspective. More »
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HarperCollins Publishers has released images of Sarah Palin's memoir. Going Rogue shows Palin, framed against a cloudy sky, staring hard into the future. Judge it for yourself (if you can make it through 400 pages of this) November 17th. [USAToday] More »
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Fleur Cowles, famed for helming the short-lived, innovative Flair magazine, her acumen as a hostess on both sides of the pond, and as author of the memoir She Made Friends and Kept Them, has died at 101. [NYT] More »
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Martha Mason, whose memoir, Breath, chronicles living since the age of 11 in an iron lung following paralysis from polio, has died at 71. There are perhaps 30 Americans living in iron lungs. [NYT] More »
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Leslie F. Miller's Let Me Eat Cake chronicles her cake addiction, the cult of cakes, and the history of cake. With, obviously, recipes. [WSJ] More »
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A former homeless guy kinda misses being homeless. His girlfriend doesn't get it. More »
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Is anybody else sick of the six-word phenomenon? Apparently the editors of Smith Magazine aren't, because they're now releasing an anthology of six-word love stories. More »
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Two years after Kurt Vonnegut's death, academic Loree Rackstraw is revealing the details of their four decade relationship in an "intimate biography." Says Rackstraw, "It was a friendship unlike any I've had with anyone." [Telegraph] More »
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"It has been a living hell." The premise of the bestseller Not Quite What I Was Planning — now deluxed and re-released for the holidays — is simple: sum up your life in six words. The results run the gamut from poignant — "On the playground, alone. 1970, today" — to needlepoint-pillow: "It got better after middle age." It's a surprisingly entertaining and telling game, as the contributions reveal. Match the celeb to his memoir*, after the jump! More »
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It's been announced that Kelly Osbourne is going to write a memoir. Not just any memoir, but an inspirational autobiography, which "will draw upon her own extraordinary experiences to help other young women as they negotiate the minefield that is growing up." Oh, so it's part life story, part self-help? Well, Kelly had better add some extra stuff into her book: She's only 23. A few months ago, it was reported that Miley Cyrus, fifteen, is writing a memoir. Writes the Guardian's Oliver Marre, "As autobiographers get younger (a trend you may have noticed), so the need to explain that their books are more than just straightforward memoirs becomes greater." Books are just another branch on the product tree, right next to fragrance and fashion line. But filling up chapters isn't as easy as filling perfume bottles. What about content? More »
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People keep sending us this Times of London article entitled "I had sex with my brother but I don't feel guilty." Two things about that. One: incest is not okay. It's not ever okay. Two: I'm sick to death of people writing first-person essays about bad behavior and expecting that the mere act of writing about it absolves them of any responsibility and places them above censure. In the Times, the anonymous incest-lover says, "[Incest] doesn't happen to everyone but it happens to some, and I don't want to be made to feel guilty about it." Then why are you writing about something incredibly taboo in a public forum? If this lady wants to fuck her brother, fine. I'm not going to stop her. But the expectation that this "honesty" is beyond reproach is laughable. More »
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Miley Cyrus just signed a 7-figure contract to write her memoirs. The girl is fifteen years old. What is there to write about? She was born...and then now. •Wanna see Penelope Cruz naked and getting it on with Sir Ben Kingsley? Click here [link NSFW, obvs] for nude scenes from their forthcoming film, Elegy. • Days after her release from Rikers Island, Foxy Brown was spotted praying at a NYC church. [Us, Egotastic, Dlisted] More »
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Kerry Cohen is the author of two autobiographical books, Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity and Easy, but not being big readers on subjects we feel are more ideally suited to learning by "doing", we hadn't heard of her before a May Marie Claire interview, "Confessions of a Sex Addict." What, wonders the magazine, possessed Kerry to subject herself to such a "harrowing litany" of casual sex encounters? "The same reason heroin addicts go back for a high," offers the knowing Kerry. Um, to ward off a prolonged period of uncontrollable throwing up and crapping yourself punctuated by severe cold flashes potentially resultable in death? Not really. "It was default behavior, and to not resist it would have taken a lot more effort," she goes on, although I have a sense she actually said the opposite. "You don't even have to be that attractive to get male attention...I also thought I was different from [most sluts] because I was trying to have a relationship...I felt unloved.'" So, wait a sec. Is this really sex addiction? Or more like the "human condition"? How many dudes did Kerry even fuck? Ooooh, it's in the first line! More »
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In the biggest literary hoax since... well, last week, when that Holocaust memoir turned out to be entirely fabricated, 33-year-old Margaret B. Jones, whose new memoir of foster homes and gang violence, Love and Consequences, has been revealed to be a hoax by the New York Times. In Love and Consequences, Jones — actually Margaret "Peggy" Seltzer — claims to have grown up in South Central L.A., running drugs for the Bloods and watching her foster brothers gunned down by gang members. In reality, Peggy grew up in the sheltered L.A. suburb Sherman Oaks, and attended private Episcopal academy the Campbell Hall School in North Hollywood (Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are fellow Campbell Hall alums). The story even has a soap opera twist: Peggy's sister, 47-year-old Cyndi Hoffman, is the one who blew the whistle on her. More »
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