Careful What You Wish For
Tara Kenny on Britney Spears, Prince Harry and Paris Hilton
If you were still holding onto any girlhood assumptions that it might have been quite nice to grow up as a royal with a tragic backstory, a filthy rich socialite from a dynasty with global name recognition, or a teen pop idol plucked from small town obscurity to become so ubiquitous that you’re known worldwide by first name alone, 2023 provided a rather rude awakening. In January, the embattled Prince Harry’s Spare pulled back the curtain on the perils of growing up royal. Come March, Paris: The Memoir revealed that the Hilton Hotels heiress and self-proclaimed ‘closest thing to American royalty’ had endured a secret, tortured adolescence of physical and emotional abuse. And, in October, just shy of two years after the end of her much-publicised conservatorship, the blockbuster memoir The Woman in Me detailed how, for thirteen long, cursed years, pop star Britney Spears lived trapped inside a gothic horror nightmare, at the mercy of a wicked family who controlled her like a (very financially lucrative) puppet.
Many millennials grew up poring over glossy images of Britney, Harry and Paris, who seemed to exist in a parallel universe of unimaginable glamour, where teenagers posed for David LaChapelle, got ferried around in stretch limos and partied in the Swiss alps. Now nudging middle age, they have reappeared to tell us that it had in fact sucked to be them (and no surprises, given society’s boundless appetite for the muck and mire of the rich and famous, we were eager to gobble up their revelations). Britney and Paris’ memoirs became instant New York Times’ bestsellers, while Spare set a new Guinness World Record for the fastest selling nonfiction book of all time, shifting 1.43 million copies on its first day of sales alone.
The subjects of these memoirs brought specific, harrowing, and to varying extents, previously untold personal traumas to their respective projects. While the public had long associated Harry with the early and untimely loss of his mother, the practically deified Princess Diana, that primal wound was freshly eclipsed by a familial rupture worthy of a Shakespearian tragedy. After relinquishing their royal duties and decamping to California, he and his wife, the American-actress-turned-princess Meghan Markle, were drip feeding the Windsor’s dirty laundry to the masses through a series of high-profile media deals. In a sea of sameish celebrity memoirs by cricketers and unfairly maligned women of the noughties, this was a story that only Harry was equipped—and arguably, foolish enough—to tell.
Meanwhile, former wild child Paris Hilton was gearing up for a literary reckoning of her own. Having commenced a public rebrand from dumb blonde heiress to survivor-advocate and voice for the voiceless through the 2020 release of This Is Paris, a documentary focused on her harrowing experiences at a series of ‘emotional growth’ schools for troubled teenagers, Paris was ready to grant us even greater access to her real, unadulterated psyche. And while the #FreeBritney movement and the New York Times documentary Framing Britney Spears generated significant public interest in Britney’s lengthy conservatorship, through which her father controlled her life and finances on the basis that she was unfit to manage her own affairs, (bar brief testimony in court and some rambling Instagram posts) the world had not yet heard directly and meaningfully from Britney.
Armed with a hidden arsenal of expert ghostwriters, all three set out to reclaim narratives previously controlled by the media and their overbearing families. By his own telling, Harry was no longer the ungrateful, stupid and lazy delinquent who once wore a Nazi costume to a fancy dress party, but rather, the victim of an icy family caught within an abusive machine, desperate to protect his own wife and children from the racism and harassment of the tabloids and the general misery of royal life. Paris used her memoir to shed the vapid, femme fatale persona she had worn like a protective shield in the wake of institutional abuse, which she was now determined to prevent other young people from experiencing. And through her book, Britney challenged the widespread perception that she is a drug-addled basket case in need of constant care, laying bare how her family muzzled and forced her to toil for their benefit, while demanding respect for her significant artistic achievements.
Though their pain is visceral and undeniable, it’s hard not to cynically position these memoirs within the context of growing ill will toward one-percenters who flaunt their cultural and economic privilege in the face of rampant inequality and suffering. Where the mega wealthy could once get away with parading their lavish lifestyles without shame, a glut of ‘eat the rich’-coded entertainment and increasingly mainstreamed animosity toward elites makes such a position increasingly untenable, at least when maintaining a sense of goodwill among the masses is the goal. For the likes of Harry, Paris and Britney to remain deserving of humanity in the eyes of a critical public, they must foreground their trauma and hardship to the extent that it overshadows their immense material good fortune. And so, their memoirs dive headfirst into misfortune while skirting over the earthly delights that readers may forget remain a presumably delightful by-product of being born into wealth, or in Britney’s case, becoming rich and revered.
Case in point: eager to signify his and Meghan’s down-to-earth relatability, Harry goes to great pains to contrast the ‘crown moulding, walnut bookshelves lined with colour-coordinated volumes, [and] priceless art’ of his brother Prince William’s home with the ‘IKEA lamps’ and ‘discount sofa recently bought on sale, with Meg’s credit card, from sofa.com’ of his own allegedly humble hovel. Elsewhere, he pontificates on his reverence for the British discount chain TK Maxx: ‘I was particularly fond of their once-a-year sale, when they'd be flush with items from Gap or J.Crew, items that had just gone out of season or were slightly damaged.’ Though Harry and Meghan consider a trip to Botswana an appropriate third date activity, live in a $14,000,000 mansion, travel on private jets and were wed at Windsor castle, royals are just like us!
The celebrities share and reflect on their collective central trauma: relentless media crucifixion. In the wake of his mother’s death in a car crash—in which paparazzi chased her vehicle and photographed her dying body—Harry recalls photographers’ brutal intrusion into his grieving process:
‘I could hear nothing but a rhythmic clicking from across the road. The press. I reached for my father’s hand, for comfort, then cursed myself, because that gesture set off an explosion of clicks. I’d given them exactly what they wanted. Emotion. Drama. Pain. They fired and fired and fired.’
Throughout his adolescence, Harry’s relationship with the press grew increasingly strained, as they painted him as a foolish, good-for-nothing party boy, while simultaneously making it impossible for him to apply himself to anything in peace. When, at nineteen, he escaped to a farm in rural Queensland (of all places!) to moonlight as a jackaroo, his trip was cut short when paparazzi breached the property, intruding on his hosts’ solitude. After joining the army and deploying to Afghanistan in 2008, Harry’s plans were again thwarted by pesky Australians when New Idea magazine leaked his whereabouts, forcing an early return home after he and his fellow soldiers became a target for the Taliban. With Meghan, the tabloid abuse took on a racial tenor—‘Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton’ declared The Daily Mail—and by Harry’s telling, his family not only refused to speak out in her defence, but planted their own harmful narratives in the press.
As young women, Paris and Britney’s bodies, wardrobes, sex lives, dating histories and betrayals were brutally picked over by journalists and talk show hosts sometimes three times their age. In Paris: The Memoir, Paris reflects on the leak of her infamous sex tape, recorded when she was just nineteen by a boyfriend in his thirties:
‘That tape, made when I was not legally old enough to be served a rum and coke in a bar, was released and monetized against my will, but when that thing hit the internet, the full weight of public outrage, scorn, and disgust came down on me instead of on the massive crowd of people who bought and sold it…’.
Of the media’s countless violations of Britney, perhaps the most egregious are the events of 2007, when amid a divorce and custody battle with her estranged husband Keven Federline, paparazzi hounded her while she waited outside his house, begging to see her baby sons. The inevitable ‘meltdown’ that followed was presented as evidence that Britney was a bad mother, descending into madness. Of her headspace, she recalls:
‘I can’t describe the humiliation I felt. I was cornered. I was out being chased, like always, by these men waiting for me to do something they could photograph. And so that night I gave them some material. I went into a hair salon, and I took the clippers, and I shaved off all my hair. Everyone thought it was hilarious. Look how crazy she is!.. But nobody seemed to understand that I was simply out of my mind with grief. My children had been taken away from me… Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: Fuck you. You want me to be pretty for you? Fuck you. You want me to be good for you? Fuck you. You want me to be your dream girl? Fuck you.’
Given the extent to which our subjects have been cruelly misrepresented at vulnerable, formative moments, it is understandable that they are desperate to relitigate events past from their own, previously sidelined or excluded, perspectives. At times, righteous anger gives way to petty bitterness. Harry is hyperfixated on the notion that his brother, the beloved heir to the throne, lives an easy, breezy life, and consistently assumes ill intent on William’s part, rather than mere cluelessness or dysfunction. Harry withholds grace and appears wilfully ignorant to the reality that William also lost his mother as a child and that, as the future King of England, is no doubt afforded an even shorter leash. This bitter sibling rivalry leads to the inclusion of various mutually embarrassing anecdotes, such as Harry’s insistence that William and Kate encouraged him to wear the infamous Nazi costume, the time they squabbled over the division of charity work, with William allegedly claiming Africa as ‘his thing’, and a physical altercation in which William shoved his younger brother into a dog bowl and broke his necklace. While all this is presumably included to make Harry appear sympathetic, it has the opposite effect, reducing him to the position of a surly, jealous child trapped in a forty-year-old’s body.
Writing in The New Yorker, Harry’s ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer takes centre stage to reflect on his writing partner’s obsession with rehashing minor grievances: ‘Harry couldn’t escape the wish that Spare might be a rebuttal to every lie ever published about him. As Borges dreamed of endless libraries, Harry dreams of endless retractions, which meant no end of revelations. He knew, of course, that some people would be aghast at first. “Why on earth would Harry talk about that?” But he had faith that they would soon see: because someone else already talked about it, and got it wrong.’ And yet, once Spare was published, rather than settling the score, the book simply ignited a new, rabid press cycle of mockery and outrage, with the media pouncing on the memoir’s more ridiculous admissions and perceived errors. ‘Facts were wrenched out of context, complex emotions were reduced to cartoonish idiocy, innocent passages were hyped into outrages—and there were so many falsehoods,’ reflects Moehringer. While Harry intended the book as a pathway through which to restore the dignity and justice he felt he had been denied, the tabloid headlines were dominated by its most absurd morsels, from the time he took mushrooms at the actress Courtney Cox’s house, to the ‘humiliating episode’ in which he lost his virginity to an older woman in a field behind a pub.
Similarly, following the release of The Woman in Me, an avalanche of clickbait content dissected its disclosures about Britney and Justin Timberlake’s relationship. Britney and her team are surely savvy enough to have pre-empted that by airing her grievances with her notoriously vexing ex—from how he pressured her into having a secret, home abortion, to his embarrassing use of AAVE—they were serving up perfect fodder for the gossip rags. However, it is supremely depressing that her attempts to right the myriad public misconceptions that surround this early relationship have been taken primarily as mere proof of Justin’s misogyny, rather than as the catalyst for a broader conversation about why, in the wake of their breakup, society was so quick to brand young Britney a deviant harlot to Timberlake’s golden boy.
Harry, Paris and Britney’s varyingly obscured employment of ghostwriters invites critique that their purportedly no holds barred, raw, unfiltered personal tomes are yet another tricksy sleight of hand. Literary types are often quick to deride the fact that celebrities do not even pen their own books. There is a case to be made that the popularity of the celebrity memoir genre signals the publishing industry's overemphasis on commercial success to the detriment of artistic merit and more broadly, the nation’s propensity toward intellectual sluggishness. However, a memoir is not inherently untrustworthy just because it came to fruition through collaboration; if anything, this writing process simply assures coherency. Britney is routinely celebrated and mocked for her chaotic, stream of consciousness social media voice. Days after the release of The Woman in Me, she posted: ‘Writing the book was so hard 😞 !!! Then I woke up this morning and said it’s all relative nothing really matters at this point 🤷🏼♀️ !!! As long as Snow has her Noonie the world is a better place 🌷🌷🌷!!! Psss swipe to see the killer dog 🐶 !!!”. While charming, a book written in this cadence would be a highly experimental and challenging read. However, when Britney employs a team of ghostwriters to help distil her voice on the page, readers familiar with her social media musings complain that the book does not sound like her.
Such demands that celebrities must toil on their memoirs in solitude to claim authenticity are underpinned by the misguided presumption that a singular version of a person’s life exists and is best revealed through first-person narration. Rather, there are limitless ways to cobble together potentially conflicting data, memories, and perspectives to construct meaning, particularly around a celebrity who has been chronicled at scale. In her book Celebrity Memoir: From Ghostwriting to Gender Politics, Hannah Yelin deems this intertextual construction of celebrity identity “celebrity-as-assemblage” and infers that “the performance of the celebrity self is always in dialogue with, and so constituted of, its paratexts and surrounding materials in a web of conflicting mediation. Thus, celebrity agency in self-representation can be seen to be multiple and negotiated, taking many forms.” Why not consider that the wild Britney crafted by the tabloids, the flow-state Britney of Instagram, the polite, teenage Britney from early interviews and the reflective Britney who narrates her life like a gothic fairytale are all equally valid and critical to the meaning of Britney Spears? Maligned celebrities’ attempts to sculpt singular, authoritative versions of their lives from the rubble of their respective cultural trash heaps are doomed to fail.
While they approach the medium of memoir as an opportunity to rewrite their own bastardised narratives, the process reveals the kind of juicy tidbits—Abortion! Drug use!—that provide fresh, low-hanging fodder for the tabloids they set out to denounce and escape. In trying to expose the horrors of fame, they end up fuelling it. Given Harry, Paris and Britney’s familiarity with the spotlight, it’s safe to assume they are aware that any revelation on their behalf will inevitably result in another salaciously reported, dehumanising news cycle. Which begs the question, if being famous is as bad as they claim, why not just be quiet and enjoy their wealth and privilege in relative obscurity? The answer likely lies somewhere within the Venn diagram overlap of a reluctance to leave money on the table, a deeply held fear of irrelevance, and the perhaps naïve hope that adding their version of events to the history books for those willing to engage in good faith will be worth the inevitable tabloid debasement. Whether a mere mortal or scorned prince, writing out of a burning desire to rebuke all those who have wronged you and to have the last, conclusive word is a Sisyphean task. While I have little hope that their memoirs will bring Britney, Paris and Harry the spiritual peace they are seeking, as a reader, I delight in their earnest, grievously petty and ultimately futile attempts to finally be truly seen, accepted and understood by a fundamentally fickle public who inhabit a post-truth world.
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Works Cited
✷ Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Spare (Penguin Random House, 2023).
✷ Paris Hilton, Paris: The Memoir (Harper Collins, 2023).
✷ Britney Spears, The Woman in Me, (Gallery Books, 2023).
✷ Hannah Yelin, Celebrity Memoir: From Ghostwriting to Gender Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
Tara Kenny is a culture writer and The Monthly's television critic. She writes about the way women use and are used by the media. Her work has appeared in Interview, The Guardian, Dazed, i-D, Paper, The Saturday Paper, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and numerous zines and independent publications.