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Reading celebrity autobiographies

While the ‘memoir boom’ of the last two decades has brought unprecedented media attention to the cultural and economic workings of the celebrity autobiography (Rak 2013), these texts have been critical sites of celebrity engagement for fans and scholars alike (if indeed the two can be distinguished) for a very long time. We have used the autobiographies of the famous to understand not just the individual, her cultural products, and her experiences of celebrity, but also her strategies of brand management. These autobiographies are also rich resources for examining discourses of identity and authenticity, systems of fan convergence, and sites where celebrity cultural and economic capital are both produced and consumed. In short, we have found much use for these texts as both windows into and discrete participants of what P. David Marshall has called the ‘terrain’ of celebrity; that overall system wherein multiple participants (individuals, industries, cultural products, etc.) negotiate the meaning of a particular individual (1997, p. 47). These autobiographies are neither external to nor capable of objective comment upon celebrity systems but are thoroughly implicated in them. As such, we must attend to the ways in which they not only represent but embody in their style and content the very terrain they negotiate. Bourdieu posits that the meaning of a work is both external to it, in ‘the objective relations which constitute this field’ (1993, p. 30), and within it because ‘works of art [are] a manifestation of the field as a whole, in which all the powers of the field, and all the determinisms inherent in its structure and functioning, are concentrated’ (1993, p. 37). The celebrity autobiography operates the same way: it derives its meaning and significance from the discourses of celebrity in circulation outside it and from the discourses and systems of celebrity it embodies and reproduces, whether intentionally or not. Moreover, we can no more extract ourselves from the field of forces negotiating the meaning of celebrity than the celebrity can – hence our own proximity to, or participation in, the multiple discourses that circulate about a particular individual shape not just our reading strategies but potentially the production of the text as well. The impact of the terrain on shaping the form and content of the text is traced here in two examples: the first, Amanda Knox’s (2013) Waiting to be Heard: A Memoir, is a brief but useful case study because the text so readily betrays an anticipation of a terrain that we currently occupy. The second, Mazo de la Roche’s (1957) Ringing the Changes, reminds us of what happens when we do not occupy the terrain embodied in the text and attempt to read it from a terrain that has been shaped by that text. In reading a recent autobiography such as Amanda Knox’s Waiting to be Heard, we must necessarily be aware of how our exposure to, participation in, and production of the discourses circulating about the individual will shape our approach to the text, how we