Did you know that Tony and Cherie Blair met on a double-decker bus and had sex on the first night they met? Did you know that Cherie was at the time dating two other men but found the young Blair too irresistible to resist? Did you know that Leo Blair was conceived at Balmoral, the queen’s Scottish home, because Cherie had been too embarrassed to pack contraception and it happened to be very cold that night?
Writing this makes me feel very uncomfortable. It is so intimate, the kind of information I should not know and that should not be printed in newspapers. And yet, all I have done is quoted information from Mrs. Blair’s autobiography, a book that has been serialized in the papers this week. In other words, Mrs. Blair has chosen to reveal the most intimate details of her life and to do it in the most lurid, sensationalist way possible.
Why? Why do they do it? For Mrs. Blair is not alone, the celebrity autobiography is big business now. Bookshops are filled with lurid kiss-and-tell autobiographies. Whereas once these books were written in old age with some sense of distance and often with an attempt at retaining some dignity, now they wheel off the press at regular intervals and tell us a blow-by-blow account of everything they have done and with whom.
I confess that autobiographies as a genre just don’t do it for me. Either I am irritated by writers attempting to convey a rosy image of themselves, or I am mortified by the warts and all accounts that have recently become fashionable. I prefer diaries, much more entertaining and direct. They are less contrived and allow us to see events unfold in a more natural way. But only if they are witty and entertaining. And frankly, I prefer a good interview. Why read a book when you can read an interview? Few lives are so interesting as to merit a whole book, and few celebrities are good enough writers to write critically about themselves. I prefer the to-and-fro rhythm of questions answered — like a game of tennis — to the long-winded prose of someone reminiscing about their life.
Besides, if I am going to read a biography, I’d rather it was written by a good journalist, who has spent a couple of years interviewing everyone involved and puts together a comprehensive and satisfying account of a life story. It is akin to the difference between representing yourself in court and paying for a hotshot lawyer to speak on your behalf. The former is often more entertaining but the latter is generally more effective.
The problem with autobiographies is that rather than tell a story, they are often a sort of strip tease. And Mrs. Blair’s book is a good example. Rather than focus on telling the story of her journey from Ferndale Road to Downing Street, she is taking the opportunity to paint a flattering self-portrait, to score points and to reveal tidbits of information that will make headlines. Of course, she is attempting to put the record straight. So much has been written about her, this is her chance to put her own version of events in the public domain, as the title of her book, “Speaking for Myself”, makes clear.
But still, do we need to know about her sex life? Surely that could have been left out. Ah but had we not had the headline-grabbing intimate details, would the book sell as well? After all, is the celebrity autobiography nothing more than a cash cow? Mrs. Blair informs us that it is up to her to pay what she calls the “Mount Snowdon” of a mortgage on their house in London’s Connaught Square. Clearly a large part of the motivation for the book is financial. She could have written an honest but sober account to tell her side of her story, but in order to make it a best seller she needed to resort to revelations and personal attacks that would be sufficiently sensational to make the headlines, as she has done. How unedifying. And how ironic that her attempt to spin a better image of herself has done just the opposite.
