They don’t have to be celebrity memoirs, and in fact more often than not I’d prefer they not be. The best trashy memoir is petty and willing to dish about everything – if they don’t name names, they let you fill in the blanks easily enough – and tells you things you want to believe are true, even if they can’t possibly be. The clunkier the prose, the better.
Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars by Scotty Bowers is the first and obvious choice, right; this is a gee-whiz aw-shucks male hustler whose reaction to the horrors of Guadalcanal was supposedly: “You know, if I ever make it out of this hellhole alive, I sure hope I get to have sex with an awful lot of people.” ALSO, it carries the Gore Vidal stamp of approval, and is in fact way BETTER than Gore Vidal’s biography, because Gore Vidal sounded like a really mean guy and not at all fun to sleep with, whereas Scotty Bowers had sex with everyone out of a sense of exuberance and good old-fashioned American bisexuality.
The dueling San Francisco party memoirs Oh, The Glory Of It All and Oh, The Hell Of It All. (Can you imagine your mother writing an angry retort-memoir using the same title that you did? THE RICH: THEY’RE NOT LIKE US.)
The Patrick Melrose novels, which I realize are not memoirs except for they ABSOLUTELY ARE and also they are bleeeeak and maybe in the kind of exhausting “rich mean people are mean and rich” way that exhausts you, so you might not want to pick this five-book series up. But if you want someone incredibly insecure worrying that bitching about somebody else’s wallpaper seems middle class, this is for you.
[Ed. Note – Nicole just angrily gchatted me. “WHERE is my credit in the trashy memoir piece for Melrose AND Scotty? I am like a drug dealer for trashy memoirs.” SORRY BABE]
The Lonely Life. Bette Davis claims to have experienced vulnerability and been pushed around by her mother. I DON’T BUY IT, but I’m still enjoying the ride.
OKAY, YOUR TURN, GO.
Garson Kanin’s book about Tracey and Hepburn!
THEY
WERE
BEARDS
even if this book says otherwise I refuse to believe anything else
I’ll always have a soft spot for Shirley Temple Black’s “Child Star,” which I know isn’t trashy in the literal sense but is still a rather bad (but good) celebrity read when all’s said and done.
24 hours until I receive the Sue Perkins memoir, I hope it’s trashy but also british and also queer. Keep you posted.
My roommate has hinted at it as a christmas gift for me and I CAN’T WAIT!
OH MY GOD I MUST HAVE IT
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1405918543/ref=cm_sw_r_t… it is beauty and grace and floopy hairedness and queerness and also cakes.
Aka the Toast in a book.
I loved Oh The Glory Of It All. I read it when it first came out and I was dating this dude who was a total moron. I gave it to him to read, thinking it might be good for him to read an actual book, and he lent me ‘Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader’ in return. I never got it back after we broke up, but I still have ‘ Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader’, so I guess the relationship wasn’t a total loss.
I own every single Bathroom Reader and they are far superior to any man.
True fact.
As a man, and speaking for all men, here, I’m torn between pointing out that this is a low bar and trying to find out what these Bathroom Readers you speak of are.
http://www.bathroomreader.com/interesting-article… they are books of pointless trivia articles and humor and are just so brilliant.
I recall enjoying Oh The Glory Of It All, but thinking back on it with the Wisdom of Maturity, I think the author would come across as insufferable.
I am DELIGHTED to find out that his mother responded in kind.
Y’know, the author was a guest on the Dear Sugar podcast about being raised with money and not letting it make you horrible, and the author was so grounded and funny and not-awful that I actually tracked down the book and read it.
Backstage Passes by Angela Bowie! It’s one of the most trashy, gossipy, fun things I’ve read in my entire life and takes place in a universe where everyone worships Angela Bowie. And don’t think she limits the gossip to David Bowie — almost anyone even remotely famous in the 70s gets talked about.
Oh my god, yes! I read this back in high school and it is glorious. Wholeheartedly seconding this recommendation!
Is that the one where she talks about David Bowie and Mick Jagger doing naked spooning or whatever it was that they were doing? :p
Where she was like ‘I found them in bed naked, you all know what that means’ and when pressed as to what *that* means, she said ‘Well they must have got drunk and passed out together. What did you think it meant?’
It didn’t quite go like that, but it does in my head.
This book was my life when I was a teenager!
Oooo only the teensiest bit trashy, but Patti LuPone’s autobiography! So much Broadway gossip. I especially recommend listening to it on audiobook so you can get the full effect of her LOUD FEELINGS ABOUT THE THEATAH!!
Speaking of Bette Davis I’m enjoying the hell out of Orry-Kelly’s autobiographY (it was never published during his lifetime! They found it in a pillowcase) as a costume designer and gown-maker for the classic Hollywood starlets’ WOMEN I’VE UNDRESSED. I’m learning so much criminal Austrialian slang.
Also holy hell Cary Grant you are the worst boyfriend.
Orry-Kelly has an autobiography?? ::stampedes to internet book purveyor::
Yeah you can practically FEEL him holding back when talking about CERTAIN PEOPLE like a certain actor who he knew as Archie that he’s not still bitter about how badly they broke up AT ALL NO WAY SIR
ARGH BOOK NOT AVAILABLE IN THE US. I can get the audiobook though, maybe I’ll give that a try.
The audiobook has one problem in that there’s a lot of lengthy descriptions of outfits and you can’t as easily skip over it as you could in text
i’m sorry i don’t know what the word problem means in this context
I love Cary Grant movies so much but you can tell he would be just TERRIBLE in a relationship.
oh god the COMPETITIVE HIERESS MARRYING his NUMEROUS FBI CONNECTIONS. Dude was a spook., and reportedly the LSD was part of an ex-gay therapy thing, allegedly
also the most recent Grant bio pretty much says the chunk of time missing from his early life was probably spent as a sex worker.
i have a personal theory he only really blossomed as an actor under Hitchcock cause they but that …slightly sinister affect he has under a huge magnifying glass.
I loved the episode of You Must Remember This* about William Haines where Karina Longworth mentioned him sharing an apartment with ‘an Australian artist called Jack Kelly and his boyfriend, Archie Leech. Both would later find fame in Hollywood themselves, Jack as costume designer Orry-Kelly, and Leech under the name *dramatic/bitchy pause* Cary Grant.’ No one does a dramatic/bitchy pause like Karina Longworth, her silence always speaks volumes.
*AMAZING podcast about old Hollywood and you all MUST LISTEN
You know Kelly made a lot of hand painted ties and Archie sold a lot of them on the street and why can’t I find just one on the resale market I ask you
Nhoover probobly bought all of them in a rage.
Thank you for telling me about this. You’re a HERO and have made my commute worthwhile.
I had no idea this existed and I’m off to order it RIGHT NOW
Also there’s a documentary/movie of the same name that came out early this year, and it’s glorious!
just watched it yesterday and it was glorious as you say!
Not trash but guuuuuys it’s been too long since we’ve had a post about the Mitfords. I WANT TO DISCUSS THEM FOREVER AND EVER. I think it’s time to email Stuff You Missed in History Class again about doing an episode about them…
YES.
I love the Mitfords, and then I have a nearly as strong love/hate for the Diana and Unity apologist industry.
I know how you feel. I never get sick of talking about the Mitfords.
If you are into Canadian Politics, Diefenbaker’s memoir is gold. You can hear the jowel-shaking as he rants about the Liberal AND Conservative machines that drove his paranoid ass outta power.
Best part? His first wife? He mentions in passing. Like “And then my wife died, and I found another lady person who was great and perfect and OLIVE I LOVE YOU”. He literally does not mention his first wife by name, or before her death. He does, however, confess to failing his grade 12 exams because he had diarrhea brought on by eating nothing but Homestead ice cream for the day and a half before the exams.
Homestead still exists, too 🙂
When you first mentioned ‘Diefenbaker’ my mind immediately leapt to Fraser’s dog from ‘Due South’, and so was puzzled for a few moments
He cancelled the Arrow.
Bastard.
Beyond Reason by Margaret Trudeau…I read that over and over as a teenager
It’s not trashy at all, but Beverly Cleary’s memoirs are great and all about her weirdly controlling and semi abusive mother, and her weird and controlling and would-eventually-become abusive boyfriend. And then she eventually ditched them both, luckily.
A Girl From Yamhill is my favorite memoir like ever. I think of Beverly every time I use almond extract.
I’m more partial to My Own Two Feet. I reread them at least once a year though.
I never read it but I heard “You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again,” by Julia Philips was very trashy. Like, look here, an excerpt published by the New York Times:
Ms. Phillips’s toughest shots, however, are reserved for Mr. Geffen and the other moguls who really run Hollywood. Mr. Geffen, who owns $780 million worth of stock in MCA and produces films, plays and records, is the “most money-obsessed person I know,” the “Donald Trump of Show Business,” with a “collagened face” that makes him look like a “middle-aged baby.” The superagent Michael Ovitz is “the Valley viper,” who deigns to concern himself with events in the outside world “only if there is a two-picture deal for one of his clients.”
I liked reading George Hamilton’s memoir, but the stories were not dishy in any way. EXCEPT, ooo I forgot, the woman in Capri who sent him a banana hammock and a donkey statue – an “excited” donkey statue. That’s all I got.
I came here to post “You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again,” which is entirely and utterly fabulous. One of my favorite parts is where she enrages Francois Truffaut by whispering into the ear he is pretending to be deaf in.
Yeah I’m going to have to get this book now, sounds like the perfect “get away” book.
I’d like to see people’s recommendations on their favorite books to travel with! I usually would get all the glam magazines, and something funny to read – like Bill Bryson’s books, or The Sex Lives of Cannibals.
I usually get something gripping–like Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series.
YES, this book rules. I read it in high school trying to be cool and adult but got extra psyched for all the unexpected Corey Haim (RIP) dirt!
Really, Corey made it into the book? Uh oh…
I remember when it came out in 1991 this was on a prominent display in the entrance of the Barnes & Noble at our local mall. I thought she was a chef when I saw the title, and thought “What’s the big deal about a cook book???” Oh, to be young and ignorant, as opposed to just one of those.
I’m not sure how I’d exactly categorize Barbara Bush: A Memoir, but a friend and I once found an old copy left at a coffee shop and spent many wonderfully funny hours reading passages out loud to each other. I don’t really have any particular feelings one way or the other towards the first lady, but her comments on things like meeting the wives of Japanese dignitaries and suffering the ills of non-American cuisine at long, boring international dinners, is just…hilarious. The best part of the book is an insert with family photos, that all include her own descriptions. (A favorite that I’ll never forget is an image of Bush Sr. and Arnold Schwarzenegger enthusiastically riding a sled down a snowbank together, with Barbara’s enthusiastic note, “George and Arnold back on the slopes!”)
okay I found this once at a book sale and did not purchase it, but I DID look for any description of when she was in college, because rumor has it that my freshman dorm room was the exact one she lived in.
anyways one of the ONLY things she says about studying at Smith was how upset she was her first year because a rumor went around that she & her roommate/best friend were actually lovers. Which made me laugh forever, because of course that’s what the gossip mill came up with.
Smith in the 1940s – not too different from Smith now, apparently.
Even in the pearls and cashmere era, house booty was still bad booty.
HOLLA
(Duckett ’01)
Hey girl hey! Morris ’15 here. There are quite a few toasties from the class of ’15.
SLSO can we just discuss Scotty Bower’s book more cause I read that entire thing with my MOUTH HANGING OPEN. I assumed everything was made up but damn if there isn’t SECOND HAND VERIFICATION OF SOME THINGS.
Also I kind of fell for Alex Tier, the orphaned millionaire who is always described as “making a half hearted attempt at acting ” and just had a nonstop beach house party and was Gloria Swanson’s best friend and picked up guys in the park and looked exactly like you’d expect an gay orphaned millionaire playboy in 1938 to look.
That book made me feel so tawdry!! All that stuff about stirring drinks with his dick GROSS!!!
How did these people have time to do anything else I wonder? Like even just to take a break and rehydrate? How the hell did movies get made?m
Don’t forget the stuff about the sandwich…
No I’m working hard to forget the stuff about the sandwhich
I clicked on this comment thread hoping someone would elaborate on what exactly made this book so shocking, and there it was.
I can’t decide if I need to read this book or get a restraining order so it never comes within 20 miles of me.
Ok, so I’m listening to this now and having a really hard time getting the part where (spoiler?) he describes being molested at the age of 7 as if it’s some kind of romance. Are there more glowing descriptions of child-adult sex play? I’m not sure I can handle that.
I thought the general consensus was that it was like 95% made up, which is why he only wrote about dead people. (They can’t sue for libel.) But I haven’t read it, I just fell into a weird internet shame spiral once trying to figure out WTF he said in it.
Came here to recommend Full Service; of course it’s #1, where do I think I am? Moving on…
To follow up on The Lonely Life, This ‘n That is Bette Davis’s 1987 autobiography and is made of gold and horror. She takes an entire chapter to take her daughter B.D.’s OWN tell-all to task (My Mother’s Keeper!) and ends it with “Shut up, B.D.”
Everything in Anthony Kiedis’s Scar Tissue is jaw-droppingly awful/the best.
Beyond the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace by Scott Thorson…the movie adaptation is only almost as ludicrous as the book! A must read!
Florence King’s Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady is a “novel” but is more of an autobiography of my favorite conservative lesbian feminist misanthropic royalist spinster. The heroine is kicked out of her Ole Miss sorority after expressing her willingness to go down on Susan Hayward.
I was going to say Scar Tissue! I didn’t think it was trashy enough though (Although thinking about it, there is a lot of sleezy hollywood in there)
I think that’s actually one of my favourite books, its definitely one of my most re-read books
Yeah, Kiedo’s DAD comes off as the sleaziest character! A great read.
yes yes Florence King x1,000
“No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street.”
I saw the title of this piece and came straight to the comments to recommend Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady.
(not so trashy but that part where she describes the boy looking at her with awe and fear in class and that’s why she went to grad school? may have more to do with my being in grad school now than is entirely healthy.)
It’s not a proper memoir, as the author is an outside party, but the Georgetown Ladies Social Club is great. A sample from the Elizabeth Taylor chapter, as told by HALSTON recounting a night after a fundraiser that flopped because DC hate Hollywood Liz even if she was married to a Senator:
“Worn and dejected, we drank away our sorrows and went on a midnight joyride, Liz dressed in a mink coat with a sheer nightgown underneath, while I had on my tuxedo. With Elizabeth at the wheel, we drove to foot of the Lincoln Memorial. While a cluster of homeless men and women looked on in dumbfounded silence, Liz delivered an impromptu rendition of the Gettysburg Address. We then got back in our car and headed to an all-night White Castle, where we ordered. chocolate milk shakes, onion rings, and a dozen burgers each. After a while, the counter girl, who’d been watching Liz pace back and forth, said to her: ‘Excuse me, aren’t you Elizabeth Taylor, the famous actress?’ ‘Yes, I am,’ she answered. ‘Now where are those fucking hamburgers?’
everything about that is fun
Somehow this is my aesthetic but I don’t know how to explain why I feel that way.
Out of this Century, Peggy Guggenheim.
Wealthy heiress has heaps of affairs and bitches about the 20th century avant garde! There’s so much scandal and great art, she’s kind of whiny and awful but it’s BRILLIANT. Also she likes dogs more than people.
I am looking forward to checking this one out after seeing a documentary about Guggenheim earlier this year. The doc was pretty good but some of the talking heads definitely commented disapprovingly on her lovers, especially when she was GASP! an older woman. I assume her own memoir is not so shame-y.
I also love that she published it without the names, and then later put all of them back in. If nothing else a triumph of record keeping!
My copy has all the names, plus photos with extra sassy captions! She’s not shamey but is delightfully judgemental about all her lovers’ wives…
Her writing is a bit clunky but I think that made me love it even more (“The day Hitler walked into Norway I walked into Léger’s studio and bought a wonderful 1919 painting from him for one thousand dollars”)
“Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me” is written by the personal assistant to Judy Garland in the late 1970’s when she was being forced into a comeback in Vegas. It’s a study in codependence and all the isms of self-destruction. READ IT.
“Can you imagine your mother writing an angry retort-memoir using the same title that you did?”
Well, my great-grandfather wrote a memoir and his wife took offense and wrote her own in response, so I can imagine. They were both self-published though, and now only exist as spiral-bound copies in a box somewhere.
I know Mallory isn’t into sports, but Ball Four by Jim Bouton is a classic of the trashy sports memoir.
Also in the baseball world, “Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big” by Jose Canseco is a fun one. He is so absurd, but seems to actually know a fair amount about what was happening in baseball.
<3 Ball Four! <3 My dad’s favorite book of all time. Have you seen The Battered Bastards of Baseball on Netflix? Great Jim Bouton stuff!
MADAM SECRETARY by Madeleine Albright, as a serious read. It is intense.
DAUGHTER OF EMPIRE by Pamela Hicks Mountbatten (yes, that Mountbatten), in which you will read many pleasing anecdotes about the British Royal Family and Queen Elizabeth II and the end of the colonial era in India.
It’s not a memoir, but “Loving Frank” is a novelization of the affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick.
I know about this book because someone tried to donate it to my tutoring program for Kindergarten-4th graders.
This book is GREAT
Hey, the kids need to know sometime…
Y’all, Aaron Burr wrote a journal about his life after the duel, impoverished in squalor, and had it published after he died. Highlights include the time he nearly killed somebody with his umbrella knife, the time he nearly killed himself by trying to light a candle with gunpowder, the time he got hit on by two male Danish prostitutes, and the time he spent all his money buying a coconut. The tone is basically “lol, well that sure happened.”
I smell a Hamilton sequel!
Dear Theodosia, I really shouldn’t be saying this to you….
The time he spent all his money buying a coconut
The time he spent ALL his money buying a coconut.
The time he spent all his money buying A COCONUT.
It was a very expensive coconut (14 shillings and six pence) and Burr was perpetually broke.
His notes on the incident say that he spent the money “magnificently, i.e., like an ass.”
It’s the kind of book you read when you want to feel better about your own life choices.
I can admire that kind of self-awareness.
I read the snippet about accidentally setting himself on fire with the gunpowder-candle, and immediately sent it to my friend, saying, “everyone says in the time before electricity, everyone went to bed and rose with the sun, but this would be ME, nearly blowing myself up, trying to get the 18th C equivalent of Tumblr-scrolling done.”
her reply: “omg it’s SO YOU THOUGH.”
I don’t remember if it was here or on Tumblr that someone said Burr = Bridget Jones, but I love it.
The Happy Hooker____My book club read the Slath autobiography and it was… like slowing down to watch a car wreck. Like, by the end you could feel Anthony Bozza just giving up on trying to make Slash’s rambling into anything resembling coherent sentences. And when he runs nakend through a resort because he’s being chased by invisible Predators because speedballs. Yeah.
This isn’t a memoir so much as Hollywood gossip about a famous unsolved crime. “Cast of Killers” by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick is about how director King Vidor supposedly investigated the murder of William Desmond Taylor for years. The part at the end when King Vidor visits Mary Miles Minter reads like a scene out of Sunset Boulevard.
Well now I want to read this! I read Tinseltown earlier this year and was fascinated (though I had some quibbles with the book itself).
I can’t believe that it is 100% factual but it is still a fun read. I haven’t read Tinseltown, but I’ll make sure to do so!
I read Tinseltown, which I thought was pretty fun. I love true crime.
It does NOT get any trashier than The Motley Crüe memoir: The Dirt.
They do terrible things to egg burritos… So much gossip. So much “UGH, REALLY?”
Love The Dirt!
YES, The Dirt!!!! Also recommend Tommyland as a “good” unofficial sequel. Haven’t read either of Nikki Sixx’s surely worthwhile contributions…yet!
The Aziz bit on the burritos is gold and I love it so.
Talullah Bankhead’s memoir is fairly tame but really deliciously fun.
Favorite line: “Apostates have hinted that I’m the ill-begotten daughter of Medusa and the Marquis de Sade.”
That book is brill.
Also, “The Sewing Circle” for all your All Your Favorite Old Hollywood Actresses Were Lesbians needs.
Oh, I LURVE The Sewing Circle!
I get stuck at the circ desk and come home to find our fearless leaders have replied to one of my comments! *swoons*
But seriously, it was like if I had a crush on an actress she would turn out to be gay or bisexual.
ALSO SAPPHO’S GIRLS
I’m stuck on trying to picture how someone could *hint* that. “oh, you know, she’s from the wrong side of the dungeon… something something snakes…”
Carly Simon’s new memoir “Boys in the Trees” has the best Warren Beatty sex story ever.
I don’t know how that man had any time to be in movies
I’m With the Band by Pamela des Barres. It’s ridiculous but also delightful and delicious.
Also anything by or about Gloria Vanderbilt.
Had to scroll down to make sure SOMEONE recommended I’m With the Band.
the jeans lady?
Hahaha! She is so much more than jeans! She has written like 5 memoirs. The Vanderbilts were epically wealthy socialites, her dad died when she was a baby and her mom — who was mean and had a codependent relationship with her identical twin and also was probably a lesbian — tried to steal her inheritance. When Gloria grew up she had one million love affairs and invented jeans (obviously not but I love that Wikipedia says she is “noted as an early developer of designer blue jeans”) and Anderson Cooper is her son.
Btw, there is totally a pornographic biography of Aaron Burr
So RPF, basically?
I think “I’m With the Band” by Pamela Des Barres fits the bill! It’s about her sleeping with various rock stars during her 60s/70s and generally having a great time. Names names (although not too many high-profile ones) and the writing is just terrible, but in a good way.
During HER 60s/70s or during THE 60s/70s? (Either way, I’m sure it’s a fun book.)
THE 60s/70s.
I love this memoir! When she quotes from her junior high and high school journals the tone is EXACTLY the same as her present-day voice. Miss Pamela remains an excited, stage-struck teen her entire life and this is delightful in a disturbing way. Or disturbing in a delightful way. Plus, learning to stand up for herself in relationships from Gail Zappa. *Shakes head*
Her Rock Bottom: Dark Moments in Music Babylon had its moments; there are some things that I did not want to know about Chuck Berry. (It involves scat, and not the singing type.)
Oh, can we count Go Ask Alice, the trashiest morality tale I’ve encountered?
Always!! I love Alice’s dedication to this journal she’s keeping. I believe at one point she wakes up in a park in San Francisco after a big bender, rolls over, and starts writing in her journal.
Mallory is already on it! (And it’s a hoax, but it wins for trashiness.)
I don’t know how I missed that when it was posted but I am SO GRATEFUL to you for linking to it here. Weeping with laughter at my desk.
I read that book when I was 10 or something and actually fully credit it for my FEAR OF ALL DRUGS EVER. It was a long time before I learned it was fake and by that time it had done its job.
Cannot recommend Scotty Bowers’ Full Service enough! What a guilty pleasure fun read!
SCOTTY BOWERS IS A SAINT AND A TRUTH-TELLER
Gore Vidal has done many questionable things but let’s take the time to appreciate him convincing Bowers to write that book.
ALSO, the book about Gore Vidal’s sex life is A++++++.
WHICH HES IN.
I honestly did not know Denham Fouts was a real person. So many literally aristocratic boyfriends, so many mysterious deaths and opium habits in palaces.
I bought a mediocre bio of Denham Fouts (we just don’t have enough info for a good one) and still loved it. NEEDED MORE PICS OF HANDSOME MAN.
so many people found mysteriously dead in bathtubs!
THAT BOOK ABOUT GORE VIDAL’S SEX LIFE WAS DEPRESSING AS HELL
Well, yeah, but the fact he NEVER gave anyone an orgasm IN HIS LIFE bc he just did not give a shit was certainly entertaining.
It did sound like he never once had fun or did more than tolerate other people.
holy shit, I never realized this book existed and now it is all I want to read. Cheerful bisexual American GI just sexin’ his way across the country? Yes PLEASE. this is the AU Steve Rogers I have always wanted
“this is the AU Steve Rogers I have always wanted” um YES PLEASE BRB OFF TO WRITE THAT FIC
I once sat in a now-defunct Borders and read the entirety of “unSweetined: A Memoir” by (yes) Jodi Sweetin.
I read “Borders” as “Bowers” and thought you’d been reading a trashy memoir to Scotty Bowers out loud
The trashiest memoir is BOY WONDER: My Life in Tights by Burt Ward. I consider it one of the worst books I’ve ever read.
He gives his wife a World’s Greatest Wife award along with a performance rating where he rates her on naked dancing, tongue action, wild sex, multiple orgasms, and screaming wallbangers to name a few.
Which he then publishes in the book.
Truly skankalicious.
what.
One of the best summaries of Burt Ward’s autobio that I read was that he went out of his way–way, way out of his way–to “prove” how heterosexual he is.
He also runs a suspicious “dog rescue” and learning this fact has rendered me unable to watch 60s Batman 🙁
I love memoirs of hard/tumultuous childhoods: The Hypocrisy of Disco by Clane Hayward, Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, and Mary Karr’s memoirs Lit, Liar’s Club and Cherry are all really good.
Oh my God thank you for this, I need winter-break/train reading and this all sounds like the best.
Favorite: Boy George’s memoir Take It Like a Man, which is PERFECTLY trashy and also all about the punk and new-romantic scene in London in the early 80s, which was so wonderful to read about. (The second one isn’t nearly as fun because honestly “getting your life together” is kind of boring, as good as I’m sure it is for Boy George.)
I also read Behind the Candelabra and it was great, is it weird that Liberace as portrayed in that book/film is kind of my goal in life? Without the AIDS, yes, but with the insane campy opulence.
Both the memoirs by Hugh Hefner “girlfriends”- Bunny Tales by Izabella St. James and Down the Rabbit Hole by Holly Madison are pretty “ew, really?” but somehow still compelling reading.
Both of them have been accused of sour grapes, but damn if their accounts don’t line up with each other despite being from different periods.
Hefner comes off poorly in both, but much worse in Madison’s book, probably from a combination of both her having been more closely involved with him and having a better ghostwriter.
I was just about to recommend Holly Madison’s book! I found it fascinating. I’ll have to check out the other one.
Holly was always my favorite Girl Next Door.
If I get the Kindle I asked for this Christmas, I’m so checking back here for trash to fill it up.
(That’s the point of a Kindle, right? Owning books that are fun but not worth the extra weight during your next move?)
And no one else knows what you are reading, which can be very helpful if you having a meddling family or if you are reading a tantric sex book on the subway.
Plus on a kindle you can read super trashy stuff in public without being judged.
I am pretty sure that this contributes to the success of 50 Shades Of Grey and weird erotica on Amazon.
I . . . am part of this data point.
Yup. I have been reading trashy romance novels lately in an effort to wake up my sleepy libido (spoiler: it’s working) and my Kindle is great for that.
I have used fanfiction for this same reason…
Also if you go to the same beach you’ve been going to since you were a kid but now that beach is a significant plane ride away and you don’t want to fill up your entire one checked suitcase weight with books.
Carrie Fisher’s memoir Wishful Drinking is everything, and I’m overdue for a re-read.
I loved both of her memoirs. I would laugh until I cried every three pages.
Is that the one that has a cover of Princess Leia slumped on a table drunk?
It is!
How else would you depict “Carrie Fisher’s dissolute years in the ’70s/’80s”?
It was part of her stage show, don’t know if it was in the book, but her daughter trying to figure out if she was related to the guy she was dating cause Hollywood family trees are game of thrones levels crazy, was jaw droppingly hilarious.
Gelsey Kirkland’s Dancing on My Grave, with all the drugs and secret sex with Baryshnikov was highly shocking to 12 year old me. Also, there is a moment when she confesses she hadn’t eaten dessert in fifteen years, and that made me want to die of sadness.
I loved Dolly Parton’s “Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business,” but it’s not trashy. It’s just awesome, and I highly recommend it.
My own trashy memoir will be called “Sarah, Not-So-Plain and Not-Very-Tall.”
Seconded. For the full Dolly experience, get the audio book.
Both of Jose Canseco’s books. He is as delightfully un-self-aware in them as he is on twitter.
Holly Madison’s book, too, although it veers into upsetting territory.
When I read Canseco’s books, a friend of mine told me to take (almost) everything he says with a grain of salt.
I liked the fact that Canseco was almost a faster sprinter than even Usain Bolt, based on his 40-yard dash time. XD
It’s all those steroids. Don’t you know they’re a miracle drug? (My favorite theme)
Ohmygod true, Ms. Madison gives a gloss over so much trauma. I wanted to hold her hand.
Yes. The whole section with Chriss Angel. If I didn’t already know she’d made it out alive, I would have been seriously worried for her.
My Wicked, Wicked Ways by Errol Flynn. The prototype for trashy memoirs everywhere.
It’s a good start with the title.
The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood by Diana McClellan, because Marlene Deitrich wasn’t only a lesbian, she was a commie spy too. (I don’t care if it’s not true, it’s a swell story.)
DIETRICH HAD A PLOT TO KILL HITLER.
SHE SERIOUSLY CONSIDERED THIS, PLANNED IT OUT, SHE WOULD SEDUCE HIM AND HIDE A POSIONED DAGGER IN HER HAIR PIN SO SHE COULD KILL HIM IN THE NUDE
the OSS was not a huge fan of this plan, so she sold war bonds instead.
I fully believe, in my heart, that Marlene Dietrich could have done this. Why didn’t they let her do this?
Andre Agassi’s memoir is AMAZING, esp bc it was billed as like being deep and literary, and it’s certainly well-written but I came in expecting it would be more DFW-esque mediations on the human condition and it’s mostly just SCANDAL and DRUG USE and HIM BEING IN LOVE WITH STEFFI WHILE MARRIED TO BROOKE SHIELDS so i obviously adored it.
Gloria Vanderbilt, It Seemed Important At The Time: flings with Howard Hughes, Leopold Stokowski, Bill Paley, Marlon Brando, Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra!
The Amazon link to “Oh, the Glory of it All” is paved with good intentions.
All My Best Friends by George Burns. So gooood.
I read a DIFFERENT George Burns memoir bc he wrote about ninety of them.
The Edie Sedgwick biography is great, girl from a gothic WASP ruling class family is swept up into Warhol’s Factory crowd. Someone mentioned Frank Lloyd Wright; there is a very juicy book called “The Fellowship” about FLW and his disturbing third wife and the incredibly exploitive and cult-like school, Taliesin, that they ran together in Wisconsin. Very eye-opening if you have ever visited there.
A friend of my mom’s grew up in taleisin west (the later one, in Phoenix). Unfortunately it’s all true.
The Royals by Kitty Kelley. So trashy. I read it on a plane when I was like 14 and was thoroughly instructed that money cannot buy you class or sense.
I remember a fuss about it being a hatchet job on one of our most beloved institutions by some colonial hack.
Not trashy, but current- and a bit heartbreaking!
I completely recommend Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology by Leah Remini and Rebecca Paley.
I didn’t watch King of Queens or her talk show, so you don’t need to be a fan of hers to like the book!!!
Mostly dishy about the Tom Cruise wedding and Scientology in general.
Yessss that was such a good read.
I have this on my Kindle, and you just gave me the push to start it. Thanks!!
OH – do Isherwood’s dairies from the 40s count cause they shocked everyone because apparently everyone thought he was friendly and easy going while in private he LOATHED EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING
Granted one gets the impression he spent the bulk of the 40s drunk so that could’ve been it (I do not buy you where constantly fending off advances Mr. Isherwood)
The Last Curtsey, all about the last class of debutantes to curtsey before the queen. Preview: one of them joins the IRA!
And every thing ever written by Helene Hanff, who is a GEM.
Helene Hanff was the name I was trying to remember for a recommendation. I love her.
Life With My Sister Madonna by Madonna’s brother, Christopher Ciccione is the trashiest, back-stabbiest memoir ever. I confess that I got it from the library primarily because I was intrigued by the lack of correct punctuation in the title, but it was worth it. It is a horribly written public payback detailing decades of sibling rivalry. You guys. Read it.
“I’m with the Band” has the most fearless “excerpts from my teen diaries” anywhere, ever.
But so much love for Marianne Faithfull’s book. It is almost not trashy. Almost.
please Kill Me by Legs McNeil!
It’s an oral history of punk rock. The guy interviewed everyone from Lou Reed to the Runaways to Jim Morrison’s longsuffering tour manager and bandmates to the Ramones. It’s not even hearsay, it’s legit straight from the horse’s mouth and this shit is BONKERS. The Jim Morrison section alone is one of the most genuinely trashy things i have ever read in my life.
You can open “Please Kill Me” at to any page at random, and read something jaw-droppingly trashy.
Furious Love! Just trashy enough to be a page-turner. And Lauren Bacall’s memoir is pretty fun, too.
“SIlm” Hawks, wife of Howard Hawks, when told that Bacall was getting involved with Sinatra , said “Well I guess everyone deserves to make one mistake.”
I really enjoyed “Furious Love” (and also the diaries of Richard Burton).
I had quite a bit more sympathy for his later financial excesses (e.g., buying Liz a Lear jet) after reading about his childhood in Wales, and how he would go around the hills collecting sheep dung for a shilling per bucket.
The Grace Kelly biography with the black white picture of her on the front is awesome. She lost her virginity! To her friend’s husband!
Tatum O’Neal’s memoir is trashy awesome. And so is Anne Heche. Which is worth the read of the being transported in the spaceship incident.
oh god KELLY’S FAMILY. Perfect upper crust monsters. They didn;’ invite her uncle’s partner of 30 years TO HIS FUNERAL and referred to him as his “valet”. Parents screaming at her over the phone at the Barbizon that being an actress is no better than a streetwalker so loudly she had to muffle the phone.
They only warmed to her once she became a literal Princess. Typical.
Marianne Faithfull’s “Faithfull: An Autobiography”, co-written with David Dalton, and Angela Barnet’s “Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie”, co-written with Patrick Carr. Even though they’re celebrity memoirs, I’ll always love them. Dishy, vampy, endlessly compelling – Faithfull’s memoir manages to be rather heartbreaking and beautiful, too, just like her. Everyone should read it. Also,
Concur – Marianne’s memoir is one of the all-time great rock bios, and a fantastic read.
Marianne Faithfull’s “Faithfull: An Autobiography”, co-written with David Dalton, and Angela Barnet’s “Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie”, co-written with Patrick Carr. Even though they’re celebrity memoirs, I’ll always love them. Dishy, vampy, endlessly compelling – Faithfull’s memoir manages to be rather heartbreaking and beautiful, too, just like her. Everyone should read it.
I have no idea how trashy it is because i never did end up buying and reading it, but I did once sit next to the author of this book on a plane once. He was quite the character.
Oh I’ll bet that’s good. Memoirs from the drug trade (either side) are usually fascinating.
I don’t know about “trashy”, but I hear that BRIAN BLESSED’s autobiography “Absolute Pandemonium” is great fun, and he reads the audiobook. This is a quote from the cover: “I first met Peter O’Toole after I punched Harold Pinter down a flight of stairs.”
Also not trashy, but I started reading “Dead Leaves: two years in the Rhodesian War”, for which the author (Dan Wylie) went back to his teenage diaries, and clearly thought “God, I was an insufferable prick”. I thought of the Toast for this depiction of the aspiring White Male Novelist:
“For no obvious reason, the train stops for several minutes. I write that down. I will deny all meaninglessness by writing things down. Nothing is to be forgotten. I have decided that this is to be The Great Adventure and a Formative Period. I will make, or invent, momentous literary capital out of the most banal of happenings.”
Maria Riva’s biography of her mother, Marlene Dietrich, is amazing.
Oh yes- one of the best. No-one’s mentioned Mommy Dearest yet? Also enjoyed Cheryl Crane, Lana Turner’s daughter’s confessional, Shelley Winters’s 2 sets of memoirs and Coward and Cecil Beaton’s diaries. I could go on as it seems I only read trash.
I’m so glad we’re having this thread before I finished all my Christmas shopping.
I’m not even going to read through the recommendations because I must EXCLAIM that the BEST trashy memoir is Peter Davison’s The Fading Smile. He vaguely knew the generation of poets between Robert Frost & Sylvia Plath in Boston (including Lowell, Ted Hughes, Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton, etc etc etc) AND HE DISHES. It’s poet-gossip perfection.
“whereas Scotty Bowers had sex with everyone out of a sense of exuberance and good old-fashioned American bisexuality.”
Okay, I am sold!
No mention yet of the scandal classic Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger? Suuuuper malicious and trashy.
Okay everyone talks about Anger and how poorly sourced some OF those stories are but BOZE HADLEIGH’s tell-alls are just as sketchily sourced but VASTLY more entertaining. If he’s making it up, it doesn’t matter cause they all sound completely mad.
I’m surprised it took so long for this to get mentioned.
I recently read I Didn’t Come Here to Make Friends, by Courtney…Something, who was on the Bachelor with Ben “Terrible Hair” Flapjack, and most notably had sex with him in the ocean on camera. I found it an interesting look at the behind-the-scenes of it all. I would not call it a favorite trashy memoir, but I would definitely call it an entertaining way to pass two or three hours.
I already talked about it in a previous comment about books I enjoyed this year, but as groupie memoirs go, Bobbie “Girl From Warrant’s ‘Cherry Pie’ Video” Brown’s memoir “Dirty Rocker Boys” was great. She came off so funny and warm, like your favorite aunt that also gives your mom the most headaches (and stories). Honestly, her relationship with Tommy Lee was TOO REAL UGH (oh and Pamela Anderson is a mean alpha girl). (Oh, and do you want to know what sex with Jay Gordon from Orgy and Mark McGrath were like? No? Too bad!)
There is an excerpt on the Amazon site and it is delightful. On attempting sex with Leo DiCaprio:
“I looked at Leo’s perfect face as he grimaced, hoping to make it past the two-minute mark. He was a unicorn. Rare, innocent, and horny. Me, on the other hand, I’d been engaged, married, and had given birth. I needed a man, not a man-child.”
OK, she’s a celebrity, but there has never bee a better trashy (but also smart and sexy) Hollywood raconteur than Shelley Winters, who wrote two: Shelley, Also Known As Shirley and Shelley II.
If you like impossibly erudite, impossibly awful British kink with your trash, The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan are fairly mind-boggling, though the countless scenes of him viciously paddling prostitutes may put you off. He was famously the first person to say “fuck” on television, and he knew — and had dirt on — everybody.
Another Brit, the irrepressible bisexual jazz singer George Melly, wrote three fabulous memoirs, Scouse Mouse, Rum, Bum, and Concertina (great title that), and Owning Up, which have been collected into a single volume. For the other side of the story, his wife Diana Melly wrote a charming book about their open marriage, Take A Girl Like Me, which isn’t trashy but is sad and funny.
I’ll offer a very strong second (or third) for Julia Phillips’s You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again, which will have you screaming.
Shelley also known as Shirley is absolutely fabulous (she shared an apartment with Marilyn Monroe!). Also one of the first to actually name lovers rather than “famous movie star x”.
David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon is also great.
John Mills’s Up In The Clouds Gentlemen Please is not trashy but is funny and sweet. Also full of the British theatre A team.
Carlos Lozano’s Sex, Surrealism, Dalí, and Me. INCREDIBLE.
“He liked to get suggestions from everyone. He would listen and file everything away in the banks of his incredible memory. When one of my ideas was incorporated, as some were, he would make a point of showing me and saying how brilliant he had been to have thought of it. If I challenged him he would become hysterical. ‘I am the genius. Dalí. I am the one. I am feeding everyone. How dare you. How dare you.’ It would be an astonishing scene but best avoided.”
Dali’s DIARY OF A GENIUS is the most self-absorbed hilarity of all.
OH! And Natalie Wood. Mother ripping off the wings of a butterfly…
Will There Really Be a Morning by Frances Farmer. Bought at a thrift store because Kurt Cobain referenced her in a song and Courtney Love (apparently) wore one of her slip dresses at their wedding (I might be hallucinating this last detail, but probably not), moved to multiple apartments and finally read years later because it is insane – like she was actually committed to an insane asylum.
Oh man the FF story just gets weirder the more you look into it, accused of being a communist spy, railroaded into an institution by her family, her legendary drinking problem and complete contempt for Hollywood and then her story being hijacked by the scientologists to demonize psychotherapy ,nuts!
Also that book was totally written by two other people after Fatmer died from cancer before delivering the book and spending her entire advance.
It’s super gripping and dramatic, and like …entirely made up? Which fits the crazy fictional turn her life took post Hollywood. Real Farmer was the regional TV hostess whom I think we’re supposed to assume was a lesbian, between the lines. fictional Farmer was some thing else entirely and it’s weird cause her movies aren’t very good? She was supposed to be electric on stage however
There’s a pretty good account of the whole Francis Farmer debacle on the You Must Remember This podcast; the shownotes have some interesting stuff to read, including this article .
I did not know that! Though the book is extreme so it’s not surprising to learn. And now I will spend a considerable amount of time researching Frances Farmer’s real life.
Two choices, reflecting my schizophrenic reading habits:
“Growing Up Brady” – the memoirs of the dude who played Greg on The Brady Bunch. Cheese-tastic.
“Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds” – I know, I know, you might not think this sounds fun at all, but it turns out there was some wacky shit going down in 19th-century Amherst. Among other things, scholars have carefully decoded Emily’s brother’s secret record of every time he and his mistress boinked and worked out which times Emily was sitting in the next room.
The Secret Life of a Schoolgirl, by Rosemary Kingsland. About her affair with Richard Burton, starting when she was fourteen.
Not a memoir, but I cracked up looking at a recent biography of Peter O’Toole and seeing that he claimed to be the only person who had slept with both Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Whereupon I promptly saw “Peter O’Toole” as OBVIOUSLY A PORN STAR NAME, WHY DID I NEVER NOTICE?
I loved Esther Williams when I was little (my mom brought Neptune’s Daughter home from the library one day when I was home sick, and the synchronized swimming really did it for me, I guess), so I remember being really into her memoir, “Million Dollar Mermaid,” when it came out when I was in high school. It has some good stuff on all her crazy swimming routines, MGM in the 40’s, learning about LSD from Cary Grant, and what a controlling a-hole Ferdinando Lamas was. Highly recommended!
I worked for Burt Ward’s brother in the early 90s. no dirt to report though, I did not even find out about their being brothers until after I’d given notice. Ward is not his real last name.
ETA sorry, that was meant to be a response to K Reads upthread a bit.
Memoirs by ex-girlfriends of ’60s/’70s rockstars are THE BEST.
A Freewheelin’ Time by Suze Rotolo
I’m With The Band by Pamela Des Barres
Wonderful Tonight by Pattie Boyd
Miss O’Dell by Chris O’Dell
John by Cynthia Lennon
Also sometimes the rockstars write pretty gossipy ones themselves.
Life by Keith Richards was GREAT
Joan Baez’s “And A Voice To Sing With” is not that trashy but is also great.
Bob Dylan needed more gossip and less trying to be Jack Kerouac in his memoir.
I loooooved that Joan Baez memoir. Really doesn’t dish that much but it does include her brief fling with a girl which I appreciated.
If Bob Dylan wrote a gossipy memoir, it would be the cattiest memoir on the market.
That fellow in the photo up there has an A+++ nose. I do love a good nose on a man.
Going down with Janis – Peggy Caserta’s memoir of being strung out and eaten ouT with Ms Joplin. As trashy as it sounds.
Minor mention of Captain Quirk – bitchy as hell about Bill Shatner.
In the first paragraph, too.
If you haven’t read Havoc on Havoc, the autobiography of June Havoc who was the actual Baby June in Gypsy, YOU MUST. At one point during the Depression she danced in dance marathons that lasted for weeks. There is a subsequent book, More Havoc, that covers her early years in New York where her mother kind of ran a private lesbian club out of the apartment. June Havoc turned out to be a great theater actor.
There is also Sian Phillips autobiography, Public Places, that spends a lot of time on her marriage to Peter O’Toole. And the Farley Granger book is amaze-balls: Include Me Out. Added treat: both spent time at June Havoc’s lovely home in Connecticut licking wounds of love gone awry.
Why are you doing this to me, Mallory? Did I subtly suggest there is space in my life for another, separate reading list that is, all of a sudden, as desperately needed as air itself? I don’t think so yet there you go, making your desires my own.
No thanks for you.
Did no one recommend Mommie Dearest? Or was that just too obvious?
Also, “Confessions of a Prairie Bitch” by Alison Arngrim (Nellie Oleson from Little House) is excellent.
For non-celebrity memoirs gossiping about family and friends and so forth, Rani Sircar’s Dancing Round the Maypole and Strains in a Minor Key are worth reading.
oh my god i hope i’m not too late for you all to see my recommendation!
Carolyn Cassady, widow of Neil Cassady, wrote the greatest trashy memoir ever about how horrid and abusive Neil was, how pretentious and annoying Jack Kerouac was, and how poorly she reacted when walking in on Allen Ginsberg having sex with a man in her guest room! such gossip! talks of threesomes! and old photos!!! so great.
Did anyone say “As I am” by Patricia Neal. So So So good — falling in love with Gary Cooper on the set of “The Fountainhead,” lol, and Roald Dahl the “Ace” fighter pilot and serious asshole.
One summer when I was unemployed and bored I read Tatum O’Neal’s memoir and John McEnroe’s memoir back to back. Boy did Tatum have a shit life. And McEnroe manages to come off as an ass even in his own book. Team Tatum.
The memoirs of Theodora FitzGibbon. I always thought she was just an eccentric Irish cookbook author, but apparently she was also a world traveler and muse. If you want memoirs about egotistical artists, escaping from Nazis by bike, and getting drunk with Dylan Thomas during the blitz, then her stuff is for you.
For the Mitford aficionado who has everything, there is like a whole genre of memoirs of the fucked-up childhoods of British aristos of the Bloomsbury and Guinness persuasions. Spoilers galore:
Portrait of a Marriage, by Nigel Nicolson, in which he describes how his father (Harold Nicolson) flew a biplane to France to drag his mother (Vita Sackville-West) away from her lover (Violet Trefusis). Son goes deep into his mother’s sex life and it is awkward
Deceived With Kindness, by Angelica Garnett, in which she describes learning that her father was not, in fact, her mother (Vanessa Bell)’s husband (Clive Bell) but Vanessa’s mostly-gay lover (Duncan Grant); Angelica grows up to marry David Garnett, her father’s former lover, with the encouragement of all concerned. Angelica’s marriage is wretched and everyone’s motivations are suspect
Great Granny Webster, by Caroline Blackwood, and the thrilling sequel Why Not Say What Happened, by Blackwood’s daughter Ivana Lowell, in which Lowell tries to figure out which of Blackwood’s lovers was her father
Tl,dr; being a British aristo seems like a lotta work emotionally
VITA!
Great Granny Webster is one of my favorite books of recent reading. Pitch perfect black comedy.
I vote for Little Girl Lost, by Drew Barrymore – about her drug-addled childhood.
Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life, memoir of Slim Keith, who was married to Howard Hawks and Leland Hayward, had flings with Clark Gable and Ernest Hemingway, among others. Friend of Truman Capote, and the inspiration for Lauren Bacall’s character “Slim” in To Have and Have Not. Good page-turning, old-school Hollywood stuff.
She was pretty good pals with Bacall AND responsible for Betty Bacall’s second carrer on Broadway but yeah her early screen persona was totally based on Slim
For glorious Hollywood memoir pastiche, check out ‘Me Cheeta’- tons of intense shade throwing, scandal, and simian naval-gazing.
If you want to go back to the eighteenth century, which you absolutely should, ‘A narrative of the life of Mrs Charlotte Charke’ is lovely. Charke was part of the Cibber family, who were big on stage and in literature, and the book is all about sticking it to her awful father, her many professional and personal antagonisms, zesty accounts of episodes of grinding poverty and quirky oddjobbing, and enthusiastic cross dressing.
Fashion designers who rose to prominence/were prominent during World War 2. The various passages about their hands and learning to love them, the chronicling of how they spent their riches like an overbearing accountant, the immensely petty back stabbing and the major dirt bag moments. I live for it and I recommend these kinds of biographies for anyone else who does too.
Bill Blass, reading Vogue in the trenches of WW2 and part of a SECRET MILITARY UNIT OF ARTISTS tasked with creating misinformation and distraction!
The fact that this is real and an actual thing is a delight!
Which book(s) are you talking about? I need to know!
There’s Balenciaga by Mary Blume which goes in depth into all of his rivalries with other fashion designers which is a delight. There’s also Chanel by Lisa Chaney which is basically one big long account of Chanel’s episodes of dirt baggery
Thank you!
Not a memoir, but Truman Capote’s letters are SO TRASHY. He’s the mean-spirited friend I’ve always wanted <3
Not really a memoir, but my old copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations (stay with me) has a whole section in the back on authors commenting on other authors work and I have never seen anything so delightfully catty in my entire life. It’s one of the most delightful things I own.
I’m surprised no one has added Insatiable by Gael Greene. I haven’t read it but it’s been on my list forever, and when i’m looking at the reviews it’s everyone complaining that there’s too much about her voracious sexual appetite and not enough about food.
Carly Simon’s “Boys in the Trees” is wonderfully trashy. I don’t know how any celebrity got any work done as apparently they were all banging all the time.
Also its not trashy at all but its still great so everyone should read it: My Life In France by Julia Child is hilarious and will make you incredibly hungry.
Mamie Van Doren’s autobiography, Playing the Field. Really gross and trashy.
Also, Klaus Kinski’s auto. Perfectly revolting.
“You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again” – a ton of juicy, I don’t give a sh*t insider Hollywood goissip
Ronnie Spectre’s Bio “Be My Baby” is fantastic. Lurid, and sad, and lush, and gossipy. Great fun.
I really loved A Charmed Life by Liza Campbell which is another entry in the, “British Aristos Have Weird Lives” genre. She grew up in Cawdor Castle, her parents had a messy split, there was a literal tree growing in their front foyer, so Liza always thought THAT was what people meant when they mentioned “their family tree…” Also, while it’s a biography, not a memoir, The Bolter by Frances Osbourne is pretty great, too, and gets into that whole White Mischief era in Kenya in the 1930s.
I read Alma Mahler’s memoir in high school and remember it being fun and kind of dishy, if you’re into early 20th Century Central European intellectuals. She was part of, and dated and married her way through, the intelligentsia in pre-WWII Vienna (including Gustav Mahler and Walter Gropius)
I will not lie – I totally read it because of the Tom Lehrer song and some of it went over my head when I read it, but it stayed with me and when I learned more about European art and design in grad school I’d keep running into names I remembered from Alma.
One of my favourite songs by one of my favourite song writers. Especially memorable for rhyming “Bauhaus” with “chow house.”
Also “Ponds” [cold cream]/ “Franz”
I am also extravagantly fond of the lines, “Her lovers were many and varied / From the time she began her . . .beguine”, especially that pause before the last word.
Fun fact… I went to high school with Sean Wilsey, but didn’t remember it until I got to that chapter in the book and recognized all my classmates. I was a good girl so I wasn’t mentioned. Amusingly enough, at my last reunion one of my classmates bitched about the fact that he couldn’t run for office because he was a bully in the book. Karma!
I’d like to recommend Rob Lowe’s memoir for 80’s era gossip…
You say “trashy”, I think “Dominick Dunne”. I know some of it was supposedly fiction and some supposedly journalism, but it all seems like the same thing to me.
I am a huuuuuuuge fan of religious memoirs, and most are too tragic to be trashy, BUT.
The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness. Full of angst and probable exaggeration and just entertaining.
The Beautiful People’s Beauty Book by Princess Luciana Pignatelli for an insider look at 60s and 70s jet-setting Eurotrash and their haunts. Always Ask a Man: Arlene Dahl’s Key to Femininity, in which Dahl declines a theory of personality based on hair color (e.g. “It’s Fun to Be a Redhead!”). Someone already cited Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, which is a must.
Zsa Zsa Gabor’s autobiography, long out of print I think. She describes being deflowered by Kemal Ataturk, chased around by Frank Sinatra, fighting with her sisters, the works. And on audio, read by the author? PRICELESS.
Girlbomb by Janice Erlbaum. Not trashy so much as full of licentious behavior and impossibly well-written.
High Times, Hard Times, Adventures in the Screen Trade, Hollywood Babylon, Yes I Can, ( not trashy but AWESOME-The Greatest ) , Mommie Dearest, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again, ( and also come on, these totally fit – The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Having it All) and in the lightly fictionalized category, Good Morning Midnight, The Lover, The Good Solider, The Beautiful and the Dammed
Swanson on Swanson!
I seem to remember a song about that in grade school.
OMG! I loooooooooove me some trashy, trash and when it’s a memoir? Oh, yes, please. Jilted lover and children of star memoirs are my absolutely favorite subsets within the genre. “High On Arrival” by Mackenzie Phillips – daughter of John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas – is simply devastatingly AWFUL. Made me hate John Phillips forever and ever for he is a gross and abusive monster.
“The Road Through Wonderland: Surviving John Holmes” by Dawn Schiller is another rough read, but it’s mesmerizing. John Holmes was the porn star known for his extremely large, um, member and referenced in “Boogie Nights” as Dirk Diggler. Anyway! I’m so relieved she made it out of that relationship alive.
Other Toasties mentioned Pattie Boyd, Marianne Faithfull, and Angie Bowie’s exquisitely bitter autobiographies. I endorse all three…particularly “Faithfull”. It’s beyond.
Thank you!
OMG I am so late to this party and now no one will ever read this recommendation but how is “The Kid Stays in the Picture” not on this list????
And Debo was immensely conservative and considered Diana "a saint" despite all the Fascism. Decca forever.
Patrick Macnee’s memoir, Blind In One Ear, relates his most delectably louche Edwardian childhood. His mother abandoned his father for the lesbian enclave in the next Manor House over (then got knocked up by yet another Lord from yet another neighboring Country House). He was sent off to boarding school at age 8 (when he wasn’t nuzzling his Nanny) where he fell in chaste love with various other boys, and acted in plays with Christopher Lee. He used his father’s horse racing insider knowledge to run a book while at Eaton and supplemented his income by selling Naughty Magazines, eventually getting ejected for pandering pornography. He tries to stay out of WWII for the early years rather caddishly because there are so many roles available to aspiring young men who like to frolic with the ladies. And then goes off to serve admirably in the Royal Navy. Filled with unceasing English eccentrics like the Lord who had a piano built into the back seat of his Rolls so he could play as he toured, or the Eton prof who gave lectures with a golden Eagle on his arm.