After the celebrity memoir gold-rush... Can the likes of Antonia Fraser save the autobiography from extinction, asks Robert Collins.
Published in The Telegraph, 13 Jan 2010

Writers like Antonia Fraser are giving a boost to a literary genre that has been taken over by celebrities Photo: Andrew Crowley

You'll have noticed that Antonia Fraser, for all the fevered press coverage attending the publication this week of her memoir Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter, isn't currently one of the housemates in Celebrity Big Brother. Neither is the Nobel laureate Chinua Achebe, whose memoir of colonial African life, The Education of a British-Protected Child, will be published later this month. Nor is the American novelist Siri Hustvedt, who has written a "neurological memoir" – The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves about a seizure disorder she developed in 2006, published in February. None of them is releasing their own brand of perfume this year or promoting a DVD of a sell-out UK stand-up tour. And you can pretty much bank on none of them popping up in the outback, and undergoing a Bushtucker Trial in the next series of I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here.

None of which would seem remotely out of the ordinary, except that with all three of them – in the wake of dozens of novels, biographies, essays and collections of poetry – publishing memoirs, we're being offered a much-needed boost in the arm to a literary genre that has been hijacked by a swarm of comedians, television presenters and reality-show contestants who have come to saturate the art of autobiography.
Take a peek at this week's hardback bestseller list. Of the top 10 non-fiction titles, six are memoirs "authored" by a bizarrely myopic range of television personalities: Chris Evans, Frankie Boyle, Ant and Dec, Jo Brand, Peter Kay, and JLS, the boy band who came second in The X Factor in 2008.

And then we have Fraser, 77, joining the memoir pack after a rarefied career as a historical biographer and an unshakeable silence on her torrid 1975 affair with Pinter and their subsequent marriage.

If you wanted to be cruel, you might say that, following Pinter's death in 2008, Fraser has leapt aboard the memoir gravy train with curious speed. Although her book, following the diaries she kept during her 34 years with Pinter, isn't a celebrity autobiography in the strictest sense, it's still dizzyingly strewn with references to an endless stream of other celebrities. Barely a page flies past without Steve McQueen or Samuel Beckett springing up in Pinter and Fraser's stellar daily existence, offering us a glimpse not only of Antonia and Harold's formidable address book, but of what domestic life with Pinter the pugnacious and, we learn, surprisingly tender, Nobel Prize-winning playwright was like.

Yet what may be most intriguing about Fraser, as well as Achebe and Hustvedt, is that their books will have appeared just as warning bells are sounding that the celebrity memoir may be on the wane.

"The biographies and memoirs sector ended 2009 as one of the poorest-performing sectors in comparison to 2008," says Philip Stone, of The Bookseller, adding that the slump appears to be "due to poor celeb sales and the decreasing appetite for the misery memoir".
The Robert Collins full piece at Telegraph online.