OUR RATING:
Where Famous People’s Daddy Issues Become Your Entertainment
The Celebrity Memoir Book Club is the podcast that answers one burning question: “What would happen if we took the most self-indulgent literary genre and applied a ceaseless campaign of public mockery by way of a podcast?”
Hosts Ashley Hamilton and Claire Parker have carved out a delightfully niche corner of the internet where they dissect celebrity memoirs with the surgical precision of gossip columnists and the emotional detachment of morticians. It’s like a book club, if your book club consisted entirely of delighting in the decadence, trauma, and absurd wealth of the rich and famous.
Each episode of this show takes a celebrity memoir, preferably one written by someone whose main qualification for authorship is being photographed frequently, and then spends an hour wondering aloud how these people function in society. Hamilton and Parker approach each book with the kind of academic rigor typically reserved for analyzing the fall of Rome, except instead of discussing political corruption, they’re breaking down why a former reality TV star felt compelled to dedicate an entire chapter to their spiritual awakening in a Whole Foods produce section.
Additionally, it’s a treat to listen to two intelligent women attempt to make sense of the literary efforts of people who think vulnerability means admitting they sometimes eat carbs. They navigate through seas of ghostwritten prose about “finding themselves” and “speaking their truth,” all while maintaining the kind of deadpan delivery that suggests they’ve seen into the void of celebrity culture and emerged with their sanity barely intact. They’re like anthropologists studying an alien species, except the aliens are famous and have book deals.
The memoir selection process seems to follow a strict criterion: if it was written by someone who has ever appeared on a reality show, dated someone famous, or survived a public meltdown that spawned a thousand think pieces, it’s fair game. This means listeners get treated to deep dives into the literary masterpieces of people whose greatest life achievement might be staying married to a celebrity for more than five minutes or successfully pivoting from child star to adult disaster. It’s all very much like watching a car crash in slow motion, except the car is made of ego and the crash site is Barnes & Noble.
Hamilton and Parker (sounds like a snobby stationary company that charges five-hundred dollars for a fountain pen) pick apart the carefully crafted narratives designed to rehabilitate public images, pointing out inconsistencies with the precision of old-school fact-checkers. Their commentary reveals the fascinating disconnect between how celebrities see themselves versus how the rest of the world experiences their existence, creating a sort of inadvertent sociology lesson wrapped in snark.
The hosts’ chemistry is built on their shared bewilderment at celebrity culture’s ability to turn the most mundane experiences into profound life lessons. They approach each memoir with the appropriate level of skepticism for books that treat getting a new publicist as a major life event. Their reactions to particularly egregious passages, those moments when a celebrity describes their struggle with having too many houses or the deep emotional trauma of being photographed at an unflattering angle, are delivered with the kind of restraint that suggests they’re holding back mountains of material that may turn each podcast episodes into a 3-hour marathon.
But be warned, this podcast isn’t just for the rubberneckers looking to delight in the caricature of celebrity culture, in some ways it becomes a meditation on the nature of fame itself. Through their analysis of these memoirs, Hamilton and Parker expose the bizarre psychology of people who believe their every thought deserves to be preserved in hardcover. They highlight the surreal disconnect between celebrities’ perception of their own importance and the reality of their actual contributions to society, creating a sort of accidental philosophy course about modern narcissism and the commodification of personal experience.
Celebrity Memoir Book Club ultimately succeeds because it treats celebrity memoirs with exactly the amount of respect they deserve, which is to say, very little. It’s the perfect podcast for people who want to stay informed about what celebrities are thinking without actually having to respect what celebrities are thinking. In a world teetering on the brink of becoming wholly unserious, this podcast serves as a much-needed reality check delivered with just the right amount of venom.
Where to listen to Celebrity Memoir Book Club
Episodes.fm | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro
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