Celebrity memoir: From ghostwriting to gender politics. Introduction

The introduction sets out how this book approaches celebrity memoir: as a site for the study of self-determination which reveals the space available for women in the public eye to tell their stories; as an intervention into the erasure of women’s histories; and as industrially produced merchandise with many agents and ghost-like intermediaries which coax or curtail the performance of female subjectivity contained within. The chapter demonstrates the urgency of understanding the power dynamics of ghostwriting and the wider illustration this offers as a microcosm of the celebrity machine. Lastly, it introduces the key critical terms this book uses for the interrogation of celebrity culture: the economics of access, the celebrity-as-assemblage and the gendered authenticity contract