Taking Note #4: what do we expect from celebrity authors?
‘Where in other forms of celebrity cultural identity is image-saturated, for authors, their public persona comes first to us in the written form.’
We often feel like we know an author, perhaps more intimately than other forms of celebrity and icons. We read words, thoughts and emotions, and it feels intensely personal, as if a book is somehow speaking directly to us. In our minds, the line between what is fictional and what is personal becomes quickly blurred, and we start to feel powerfully connected to an author. Where in other forms of celebrity cultural identity is image-saturated, for authors, their public persona comes first to us in the written form. This feels, for me at least, enormously more real and authentic.
Ahead of Hay Festival 2023, where we will be seeing some of our most beloved and admired authors speaking, with figures attending such as Dolly Alderton, Margaret Atwood and Douglas Stuart, we are thinking about ‘celebrity authors’ and what exactly that means.
Dolly Alderton is a writer whose personality and zeal for life and romance has integrated every aspect of her writing. These days, her reputation precedes her work. Now with a tremendous public identity, her attitude to what she contains in her writing has really changed. In her first book, the revealing memoir Everything I Know About Love, Dolly spills all. But does this give us a right to assume we ‘know’ her?
In an interview with the Radio Times, she confesses, “I really never expected to sell so many copies, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have been so revealing.” On her confessional style, she remarks, “I think now I’m understanding how defined my generation was by sharing; we were the internet pioneers.”
It’s so true, we are so used to people spilling and sharing so much of their lives online, that we now perhaps expect this from writing too, even in fiction. In the cultural imagination, it is hard for us to separate fiction from lived experience. And really, it’s an age-old question: can we separate the art from the artist?
We have had authors speak to us about this in the past, from Cecile Pin to Danielle Evans to Jessica Andrews. I can only imagine it must be frustrating, everyone assuming what you’ve written in a work of fiction is true. Jessica Andrews (author of Saltwater and Milk Teeth), in conversation with our editor Madeleine, said:
“So, my first book, Saltwater, is semi-autobiographical and I was honest about that from the beginning - I think because I felt I couldn't really talk about it in a sincere way if I was pretending it wasn’t true. When I came to write my next book, I had to think a bit more about what my project was going to be. I thought – am I going to continue to write from life? Or am I going to do something quite different?
Ultimately, Milk Teeth does have some elements of lived experience, but it is more fictional as well. Although it feels true to me, if you sat me down and asked me, “can you verify whether this, this, or this happened?’, I wouldn't be able to. I think it comes down to the idea of emotional truth because, for me, the emotional world of a book needs to feel true and authentic to both the reader and writer. I think fictionalising events sometimes gives the author a bit more freedom to get at the truth of the emotion that you're trying to portray.”
It is undeniable that some element of lived experience and lived emotions will seep into a writer’s work, despite the level of factual detail and reality. And when we go to see an author in the flesh, do we expect this from them too? I think we certainly expect something more authentic and less performative compared to other forms of celebrity.
In our upcoming issue, Light, Madeleine speaks to Caroline O'Donoghue about being in the public eye as a podcast host and author. Here’s an exclusive snippet from the conversation, out in full in our print magazine next month!
“I wanted to ask you about the phenomenon of ‘author as celebrity’ and how your experience as an author in the public eye has changed over time. I wanted to ask this because I’m sure a lot of people who read your books and listen to your podcasts will feel that, in some way, they know you – is that bizarre? The blurring of the public and the private?”
“Yeah, it’s so interesting isn't it? I have a lot of complex thoughts that I don't know if I can totally unpick, but there has been a change in my life recently, post the pandemic, with people who have listened to Sentimental in the City and then stuck around! So now, there are so many lovely people who come up to me in the street and tell me that the podcast really saved their life; they tell me about all of the terrible things that were happening to them, and how Sentimental in the City was one of the things they looked forward to, and I always say the same thing, which is that it saved my life too – it was something that kept my life together
[…] And also, there’s definitely a thing with authors who sell many copies of their books who try to do the whole, ‘don’t look at me, just look at the words, don't look at me’ thing. I admire them very much, but also, I want to do this job for the rest of my life and I also want to have a nice life, and I don't think that's shameful, and I'm not an idiot – I know that in order to have those two things and in order to have the kind of readers that follow you through your whole life, you have to be really good, but also, you have to be someone they feel a little bit invested in. It’s really just like people who go to the expensive organic farm shop because they like the couple that own it! I just don't think that's a cynical or weird thing, I think it's an ancient kind of beautiful thing.”
We are so excited to see some of our beloved writers over the next two weeks at Hay Festival, offering us their unique insight in the flesh! And hopefully, as moved as we are by them, they can feel a little moved by our love and support for them too.
I will end this with an extract from the Wayne Koestenbaum’s essay ‘Celebrity Dreaming’, from Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars and Aesthetics.
Selected dreams of writers 1978-1998
Joyce Carol Oates sent me a special-delivery thank-you note for a dinner I’d served her.
Joyce Carol Oates (wearing a negligee) hugged me and said she was hearing voices, which meant she was writing a story.
Joyce Carol Oates performed Salome’s dance of the seven veils in a baseball stadium. […]
Susan Sontag wore a pink miniskirt and sat like an odalisque on her couch. Three people were eavesdropping on our conversation; she shooed them away with a radical fist. I told her I’d loved her ever since I read On Photography when I was twenty-one. She smiled at the praise.
Joan Didion, beside me on a couch, said, “We like people.” She disapproved of writers who didn’t. Wanting to be alone with me, Didion urged a dull intern with sharp literary tastes to leave the room.
