Whose life story is it anyway?

Few celebrities write their own autobiographies nowadays, so shouldn't these ghostwritten efforts get their own section in bookshops?

Well, I was born in Bermondsey in 1981. Jade Goody's 'autobiography' topped the bestseller charts. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe.

Jade Goody is as likely to build her own spaceship and fly to Mars (I wish) as she is to write a book. And yet her autobiography - called, erm, My Autobiography - topped the bestseller charts for weeks when it was released back in May.

Similarly, Peter 'Mr Jordan' Andre might have penned his number three hit Insania, but he didn't write a word of his official life story, All About Us: My Story - even though the grammatical peculiarity of its title might suggest otherwise.

I'm no classics scholar, but I'm pretty sure the 'auto' bit in autobiography means 'self' - as in "this is my story and I wrote it myself", rather than "this is my story and I spent a couple of hours in a hotel telling it to some bloke with a Dictaphone who went away and wrote it up and then I couldn't be bothered to read it before it was published."

Jean Paul Sartre didn't take on a ghostwriter for his 1964 autobiography The Words and Mahatma Gandhi managed his 1927 tome The Story of My Experiments with Truth all by himself. But Posh, Becks, Wayne Rooney, Kerry 'my life's a car crash' Katona, Jordan, Big Brother winner Pete Bennett and that woman with the blond bun from Channel 4's How Clean is Your House all needed a literary helping hand - ie someone to write for them - with their respective 'auto'biographies.

These texts are clearly being misclassified. Billie Piper's Growing Pains and Chantelle 'poor man's Paris Hilton' Houghton's Living the Dream do not belong in the autobiography sections of bookshops. But where should they go instead?

Due to their first person form and the close involvement of the subject (who might even approve copy if there is time for it to be read to them in the car between the Heat magazine photo shoot and the T4 studios) they're not biographies. Certain cynics might suggest their fictional elements mean they could, ostensibly, be stacked alongside novels. But, as I could never afford the legal fees involved in concurring with such a view, I've got another idea.

It's time for the creation of a new autobiographical sub-genre into which we could lump all these dimwits' self-aggrandising texts. It could be called 'proxy-ography'. Or, cashing-in-ography. Or maybe just 'total crap'.