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.

This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. Said gentleman-scholar has re-upped his donation, so keep pitching me, academics longing for freedom. Many of us are justifiably sick of vampire stories. In the last decade, popular culture has been saturated by them, in forms ranging…