The Memoir Stack: What Celebrity Confessionals Taught Me About Living In-Between

Celebrities, they are just like us

I closed the back cover on Demi Moore’s Inside Out, quickly read Kelly Ripa’s Live Wire in two days and I’m already on my next celebrity memoir — Matthew Perry’s Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is currently on my nightstand. But it got me thinking about the stack of celebrity memoirs I’ve worked through over the past few years, and how much a good celebrity memoir can hand you when you’re standing exactly where I am: not young, not old, not who I was, not quite who I’m becoming yet.

Demi Moore, Inside Out — The one that hit hardest. She writes about fame, a body scrutinized before she’d decided what she wanted it to mean, and the slow work of separating who she is from who the world decided she was. She experienced things as a child that no girl should experience and much of it was because of her mother’s lack of mothering. Yet, Demi was there for her mother at the end of her life and managed to forgive her.

Kelly Ripa, Live Wire — Not my favorite. A lot of it is long and stream-of-consciousness, jumping through life stages without much connective tissue. My favorite stories were the ones where she gave a behind-the-scenes look at her celebrity encounters. A quirky story about Melanie Griffith and another about a dinner party where she sat with Richard Gere were highlights of the book. It needed more of that. Her story about her youngest son, his dyslexia, and her own reckoning with becoming an empty nester, made the read worth it.

Jessica Simpson, Open Book — Simpson wrote this one from her own journals, kept since she was fifteen, and it shows. It’s less polished pop-star recap and more a real reckoning with the gap between the persona (“America’s Sweetheart,” the “chicken or fish” punchline) and who she actually was underneath it. She’s candid about her path into addiction and the long road to sobriety. It’s the rawest book in this stack, and probably the one that argues hardest for the idea that “having it all” and “being okay” were never the same thing.

Amy Poehler, Yes Please — Funny, scattered in the best way, unbothered about being liked. Her honesty about ambition, that wanting things loudly doesn’t require an apology, is a lesson a lot of us didn’t get handed early enough.

Tina Fey, Bossypants — I really loved this one. Less tell-all, more case study in leadership. Underneath the jokes, it’s really about what it takes to lead well, and about making sure women’s voices are actually in the room where decisions get made.

Cher, The First Time — I love Cher and this made me love her more. A collection of individual stories from early in her life and career rather than one arc. Strikingly plain about reinvention and outlasting every prediction made about her.

Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? — The lightest in the stack. Less a single arc, more the small, specific anxiety of feeling like you’re on the outside looking in, which doesn’t fully disappear just because you’ve made it.

Matthew Perry, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing — Still working through this one. However, it is already a bit harder to read than the others as his tone seems whiny. He traces his addiction back to barbiturates he was prescribed as an infant, just weeks old to treat his colic. This makes for a striking origin story, but the framing sometimes reads more like a search for someone or something to blame than a reckoning with it. Even though I am early on in this read, it’s less Hollywood tell-all, more addiction memoir that happens to have a famous face attached.

What connects all of these is that every one of them wrote from some version of the in-between. That’s the thread I keep pulling on in my own reading pile. That pile has more than just celebrity memoirs.

Next up on the stack: open to recommendations — drop yours in the comments.