It’s been just over a year since my mum died. However, Mariah Carey doesn’t measure time, and the plus side to this would be that if I didn’t measure a year, it would just be another day. All the ordinary things I’m doing would just be ordinary, rather than feel like a tragic forced march into a continuing future without her in it. Things are moving on whether I want them to or not, and in fact, all going well, I’m hopefully moving house by the end of the summer. Therefore, I’ve started a summer reading challenge. It is nothing too crazy or themed, the main challenge being that I need to get rid of and therefore read as many of my books as possible so I don’t physically have to carry them.
I’m grouping books together by themes, and I figured the best way to start was with stuff that felt less intimidating, which in this case is the Celebrity Memoir.
I started with The Meaning of Mariah Carey, after a nostalgia trip at a house party lead me to show some friends the ‘Obsessed’ music video. It is a long-running Ruby fact that I believe Obsessed is the best diss track of all time, and I’ve always rooted for her ever since I saw her do Eminem boy drag.
While I would say I’m a pretty normal fan, but when I finished that book, I understood religion, and in the lack of it, why people worship celebrity. For context, Mariah Carey had an extremely difficult childhood, full of racism and neglect. The book obviously tracks her ascent from these traumatic times to a glittering career as a beloved famous singer, although not without it’s obstacles.
I’ll say, I liked the book on a normal level. While all celebrity memoirs have a vested interest in conveying certain angles, you could feel Mariah’s voice come through. It speaks to a lot of systemic bias and racism, especially in the music industry, that I was completely unaware of as a white girl growing up in the 2000s, and I am prone to believe her on. It was also both funny and self-aware of how the iconography of Mariah exists in the public lexicon. Even if she may not have been telling a 100% accurate telling of how events went down all the time, I don’t care - I enjoyed it!
But despite it’s generally non-linear narrative, the overall arc is from someone in a miserable situation as a child, who despite her hardships, eventually gets her perfect Christmas with her family and fans and and security. I found myself thinking it was…dare I say….inspirational.
The thing about autobiography is that often you have to make your life fit a conventional hero’s narrative. Celebrity memoir perhaps does this most easily as it is literally the rags-to-riches tale, on how you overcame adversity and anonymity to become the extremely wealthy person everyone thinks they know. This means that at the end point of the ‘story’ you have to be at some triumphant point in your life.
For Mariah, it is decades into a successful career, having the happy Christmas she always wanted. For Britney Spears, it is freedom from her conservatorship. For Jonathan Van Ness, it was being on Queer Eye. Etc, etc.
I realise as I was reading TMOFMC, I am in ‘the middle’. I would be at the part of my memoir where, while I have had some small successes, I am at my emotional rock bottom. For Mariah, this is probably characterised by her marriage to Tommy Mottola, who she unknowingly entered in a coercive controlling relationship at her beginning of her career. And the thing with memoirs like this, no one ever writes the thing from the middle. If people wrote from their terrible situations with no form of redemption or triumph, we’d all become too depressed to function.
During the reading of this book, I received a pretty big professional rejection of top of the usual good stuff I’m enjoying at the moment, like endless job hunting and the fact one of the people I loved the most in the whole world is still dead forever. This project would have guaranteed around 3 and a half years stability and losing that felt like I was suddenly skydiving without a parachute, unsure to where I would land.
In my nihilism free-fall, I realised that the outcome you want is never guaranteed. This may especially resonate with the working class creatives who may be reading this, but I have and will constantly experience institutions and people who you want to believe in, but may fail you at any given moment. Sometimes it feels like you are clinging onto the industry of your dreams by the edge of your nails, and if you slack at the wrong moment, you will be lost forever.
So when you read the aspirational narrative of Mariah in Aspen, it gives you something to believe in. You could read this and think, maybe, if I persevere with my natural talents as Mariah did, I can overcome economic and emotional adversity to achieve my dreams. It’s intoxicating as a thought, and I briefly entertained getting a ‘What Would Mariah Do’ as a bracelet. However, I realised then I was deifying her, and I had to remember that putting any celebrity on a pedestal is a bad thing to do, because they are people, not omniscient all-powerful beings and therefore likely to make a mistake you will find disappointing. Also no matter how hard I try at karaoke, I doubt I will ever be able to afford taking my entire family to Aspen for Christmas.
But what if persevering doesn’t work out?
When bad things happen to you, you wonder why these things happen to you. There’s lots of ways you can go with this thinking (a lot of which aren’t great tbh). But a realisation I came to recently is that without religion, without living in a ‘meritocracy’,because let’s face it, we don’t, without any divine order, cosmic framework or higher power that is particularly looking out for you, then the truth is that the bad things that happen to you specifically are often completely random and no matter what you do or how you live your life, could simply happen again! No matter how hard I worked, nothing I did would have stopped my mum getting cancer. And there is nothing I can do to stop any of my other loved ones from getting it again. There is no magical safety net for your life and this is, understandably, terrifying.
So when you realise you live in this ‘middle’, with no guaranteed happy ending, it puts your head in a strange space for a few weeks. I can only apologise to my friend Sarah, who I manically tried to explain this to in a coffee shop. Thanks for not sectioning me! But the thing about existing in this middle is that I suddenly felt…exhilarated. I didn’t understand it at first and don’t get me wrong, I was (and let’s be honest, still am) incredibly stressed all the time. But when you have no preordained future to speak of, you realise the future could be literally anything. Maybe I’ll become a gardener. Or a painter. Or maybe I’ll move to America and become a professional improviser. (Which I see could also be a viable reason for sectioning). In the short term, all I could do was focus on what was literally in front of me that needed doing, and not just creatively.
I’ve never been a fan of the phrase ‘trust the process’ .To me, it suggested that if you keep going with the process, even when it seems that it’s not actually doing anything, you will get the outcome you desire eventually. It’s just not true! But, and you’ll have to forgive me if I am the last person in the world to realise this, but maybe ‘trust the process’ has to mean something else.
I finished a few small things I’ve been working on. I did some painting. I knitted a jumper. And I finished a film treatment. But something I realised about finishing these things, is that they are not the end result, but a necessary stage in your journey. I could only knit a jumper, because I knitted a sweater vest (yes, the sleeve holes were too large, so I figured in for a penny, in for a cute, cropped but still baggy fit pound). I may never actually make a film, but the only way I ever could is by finishing the treatment. You cannot create the more complicated and intricate products until you have made the steps before it. All your work is not an end goal, but a stepping stone.
The reality is our lives do not follow the hero’s journey. There is no final showdown or no big boss to defeat. You don’t just get the one thing you wanted and live happily ever after. There is no ‘end’ to mourning, where you conquer grief once and for all. Things go up and down all the time, and you just keep going and developing and changing as a person until you die. It is all just process. The things you want are not guaranteed, but the only way you could even possibly get them is by going through the process. And maybe that’s what ‘trust the process’ has to mean. We just have to make the art when we can, because the art we make is the snapshots of who we were and what we care about in that moment. It is a reminder that we can always learn, and try new things, as well as hone what we do. It is a stage, and where it leads, I don’t know, but we couldn’t get there without it.
It’s been six years of writing this newsletter, and it has been incredibly inconsistent. The content is forever changing, I can never stick to a schedule and every other day a celebrity joins Substack and immediately dwarfs my personal essays into obscurity. But I keep writing this newsletter and I love doing it, because maybe that’s the point. I write it when I have to write it, and it is the tide markers of my process. I’m still here, and maybe I’m drowning, but also I’m waving, and while I’m still writing, I’m still afloat with a sea of possibilities (and disasters) ahead of me.
Maybe the appeal of the celebrity substack is that it is these god-like figures writing from the imperfect middle, letting us peek behind the curtain and writing about the process of projects and fame before we know where they will succeed once more. Or maybe we are all just nosy, I don’t know. (Although CMAT, if you ever read this, know that I love your music and writing and I will continue to butcher your songs at karaoke/in my shower - tbh, an alternative title for this newsletter could have been ‘Where’d You Go (Crazy Girl Boss))
Anyway, if you’re around in Manchester, I’m exhibiting in the Manchester Open, if you want to check out maybe my last watercolour painting. Don’t get me wrong, I love the painting itself, I just recently realised I prefer acrylics. After all, you learn something new every day.
The other books I read in my celebrity memoir journey:
Why Did You Stay? - Rebecca Humphries
I was surprised how much I zipped through this back-and-forth narrative of a toxic relationship that disintegrates in the public eye and how you recover. I’ll disclose I actually met Rebecca at a writing retreat, and not to sound like that one Limmy tweet format, but she was really funny and nice (and we had a great chat about the arts and class) , and I’m pleased with how much I enjoyed the book. She also writes a Substack for those who are interested in beauty and lifestyle recommendations!
Wishful Drinking - Carrie Fisher
Considering the intensity of this woman’s life, she handles it all with tremendous humour and never directs the blame to anyone else. Honestly it made me even sadder that she is no longer with us, as she was clearly one of the funniest to ever do it.
The Woman in Me - Britney Spears
I’ll say this didn’t quite have the same writing flair as The Meaning of Mariah Carey, but the latter half about the conservatorship will make you angry beyond belief. If anything, this just is testament to the imperfection of how people actually recover from trauma versus the convenient public narrative everyone wants to see and I hope she gets to live her life in peace and post her dancing videos to her heart’s content.
Finally, I want to say my own tribute to the creator of perhaps the best memoir I ever read/watched, Marjane Satrapi. She died this week ‘of sadness’ from losing her husband, and I was genuinely heartbroken. As a twelve year old who loved Studio Ghibli and The Simpsons, Persepolis taught me the power of animation and memoir was not just for fantasy or entertainment, but can be used fantastically to tell a powerful true story. It is still one of my favourite films of all time. Whenever I smell jasmine, I think of you, Marjane, and the final frames of your grandmother. May you and your art live on and may people for generations to come get to see it and be inspired by it also.
Also, if you enjoy Persepolis, I recommend Embroideries, a book she wrote detailing the stories of sex lives of Iranian women. My parents did not know that when they bought it for me as a teenager, but worth a read nonetheless!
That is all for now. I’m finishing up the next batch of books for the challenge, which are all Food Memoirs. I don’t know what the wider topic will be yet, but I guess that’s the fun of it!
As previously mentioned I am still in the never-ending job hunting hell/ freelance life, so if you enjoyed this newsletter, consider donating to my PayPal!
However I understand things are financially tough for a lot of people at the moment, so one of the most useful things you can do for a writer is share their work! So please feel free to share on social media if you can!
Otherwise I’ll see you next time my little croissants xoxo
keeeep writing! & also for more female celebrity memoir, see Down the Drain or Famesick. Different brands of excellent chaos
Gorgeous!