3 memoirs illustrate the peculiar lives of celebrities
- Written by Liz Evans, Adjunct Researcher, English and Writing, University of Tasmania
Throughout the 1990s, I was a music journalist in London. I profiled hundreds of rock bands at the start of their careers, including Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails and the Foo Fighters. I can’t imagine a better way to have spent my twenties. But I witnessed a downside. For many musicians, success was a shock, and nearly everyone I knew struggled with aspects of it at times.
Most were affected by the obvious pitfalls of sex, drugs and alcohol, and some didn’t survive. A lot had trouble reconciling their artistic values with the rigorous demands of a cutthroat business, despite their ambitions. Women, including Björk, Tori Amos and Kim Gordon, described their battles with structural misogyny across the industry. And, in a world that rewards performance and persona, many had trouble establishing healthy relationships and holding onto a sense of identity.
The psychological pressures of fame have since intensified. Social media poses a constant threat to personal privacy, and, for better or worse, parasocial relationships are on the rise. But a recent batch of celebrity memoirs, all set in the pre-digital age, support my observations from the 1990s. Famous people lead peculiar lives, and success has always carried a cost.
‘I don’t know who I am’
The most tragic of these accounts is From Here to the Great Unknown, a collaboration between Elvis Presley’s only child, Lisa Marie Presley, and her oldest daughter, Riley Keough. According to Keough’s preface, her mother worked on the memoir for several years, battling with self-doubt before asking her daughter to help. A month later, in January 2023, Presley died aged 54 of a cardiac arrest due to a small bowel obstruction following bariatric surgery.
But after Jackson, although Presley had another two husbands, she never found security. “I don’t know who I am,” she states in the book. “I never really got the chance to uncover my own identity. I didn’t have a family. I didn’t have a childhood.”
When her son Ben committed suicide in 2020 at the age of 27, she was finally overwhelmed by her lifelong sense of failure and purposelessness. Unable to face a funeral, she kept Ben’s body in her home for two months in a temperature-controlled room before laying him to rest at Graceland. In many ways, she never recovered from his death.
Keough, who, somewhat unconvincingly, describes her childhood as “perfect” and “amazing”, says her mother wanted to tell her story in order to understand herself and to be understood by others, “in full, for the first time in her life”. The extent of Presley’s personal tragedy, of not being seen, known or witnessed within a world of luxury, lies in these words.
Lisa Marie Presley, second right, her daughter Riley Keough and her twins Harper and Finley Lockwood pictured in 2017.
Jordan Strauss/AAP
Watching from the wings
While Presley’s memoir conveys the destructive side of inherited fame, media consultant Elliot Mintz’s book, We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me looks at the peculiar allure of stardom for those in the wings.
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The story begins in the wake of John Lennon’s murder, a tragedy directly born of fame. The opening pages tell how Mintz, at the time a broadcaster and close associate of John and Yoko, has been summoned to the Dakota building in Manhattan to compile an inventory of John’s belongings. But while this laborious task is testament to Yoko’s faith in him, Mintz has not been personally informed of John’s death, which is odd. He hears about the shooting from his mother, who has seen a television report, and rushes to the airport in a panic to catch a plane to New York. During the flight, he discovers “my best friend is gone” when an air steward explains why she’s crying.
This incongruity typifies the memoir. Graciously told with an old-fashioned charm, the book is presented as an intimate portrayal of life with an extraordinary couple. Yet it’s more a study of dysfunctional interpersonal dynamics where the rich and famous hold sway.
As an adolescent, Mintz was isolated and cursed with a stutter. He developed fantasy relationships with TV talk show hosts, and confesses that “my only friends were on the airwaves”. During the 1970s, he lived in the bohemian haven, Laurel Canyon, and worked in broadcasting, which is how he became part of Lennon and Ono’s personal entourage.
Mintz’s first encounter with Yoko was for a phone interview on his LA radio show during which he cleverly avoided asking the artist about her famous husband. Impressed, Yoko began calling at all hours of the day and night from New York, with John soon joining in.
Gradually, the couple began to trust him. A useful Hollywood contact who comes across as easily flattered into compliance and servitude, he installed a red light on his bedroom ceiling that flashed whenever the phone rang. He hired private investigators at his own expense to help Yoko secure personal details of potential business associates, and after playing the couple’s controversial third album on his radio show, he lost his job.
But aside from an all-expenses trip to Japan, where he acted as John’s minder under Yoko’s orders, the couple never paid him a cent, despite their constant demands.
Elliot Mintz.
Photograph by Jimmy Steinfeldt/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Aware of his status as unpaid assistant, Mintz nevertheless regarded the Lennons as close friends, and even family. But he is never clear about what he meant to them on a purely personal level, and the one time he introduced them to a girlfriend, it didn’t go well. “Whatever magic happened between me, Yoko and John when we got together, it couldn’t be recreated as a party of four”, he says, with unsettling acceptance.
The most revealing, and disturbing, moment in the book is after a party, during which John subjected Yoko to the cruel humiliation of having loud sex with another guest in an adjoining room. Worried about the aftermath, Mintz tries to imagine a world in which the “magical couple” are no longer together, but is unable to bear the thought.
Tellingly, he also fears for himself.
I wondered whether my friendships with them could survive a split. Who would get custody of me? How could I possibly remain friends with just one of them? Or would I end up being abandoned by them both?
In the end, Mintz’s expectation that “the three of us would grow old together” was shattered by John’s murder. He has since maintained a connection with Yoko, but ends his book asking whether the sacrifices he made for the couple were worth the nine years he spent in their company. Interestingly, aside from wondering whether he might have married and had a family, or ended up in a less glamorous career, he doesn’t provide an answer.
‘I was who I was my whole life’
For a more straightforward, firsthand account of fame, Cher: The Memoir, Part One is hard to beat. A big, bold, engaging story of grit and determination that charts the initial rise of Cheryl Sarkisian from poverty and hardship towards becoming the “global icon” known as Cher, this book has all the right ingredients for a blockbuster celebrity biography.
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Tracing the first four decades of the superstar’s life, from her birth in 1946 to the brink of her acting profession in 1980, this hefty volume focuses on Cher’s turbulent upbringing and the earlier stages of her singing and entertainment career. It includes her chequered marriages to Sonny Bono, with whom she found success as the pop duo Sonny and Cher, and musician Gregg Allman, as well as her relationships with record label boss David Geffen, and Gene Simmons of Kiss.
Ever the performer, when Cher first agreed to publish a memoir, her main concern was how to replicate the authenticity of her voice. Famously dyslexic, she hired a ghostwriter, but was unhappy with the first attempt because it didn’t sound like her. Two more ghostwriters were found, and the book was rushed out in four months.
Regardless, certain critics have bemoaned the flatness of tone. But while Cher’s distinctive, sassy style would have been hard to capture on the page, no doubt the writers were aiming for coherence. Given the rich, eventful nature of her life, this can’t have been easy. Cher’s memoir is a true adventure story.
Left in the care of children’s homes and extended family members as an infant, Cher experienced a wildly insecure childhood with her beautiful but unstable mother, the aspiring actress, Georgia Holt. Together with her half-sister, Gee, Cher moved home and switched schools constantly, had a string of father figures, and was a teenager by the time she met her biological dad, Johnnie Sarkisian, a heroin addict.
Despite such a difficult start, Cher didn’t buckle. Instead, she developed a fierce independence, a free spirit and a strong sense of self, and from a young age, was determined to achieve the singing and acting career that eluded her mother.
“I guess I was who I was my whole life,” she says, recalling the time she impressed her family with a song at the age of five.
Cher and Greg Allman.
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Perhaps inevitably, given the mostly terrible male role models of her childhood, Cher’s marriages were her biggest downfall. Sonny Bono turned out to be pathologically controlling, cheated her out of her money and engaged her in a bitter custody battle over their child, Chas. David Geffen came to the rescue, arranging lawyers and supporting her back to independence, and for a while she was happy with him. But then she fell for Gregg Allman, who suffered from chronic addiction issues, and lied about his habits even after their son, Elijah Blue, was born.
While the book details her divorce from Sonny and outlines the negative episode with Allman, it skims over the breakdown of her other relationships, maintaining the upbeat survivor mode that has become so consistent with her public image. And yet, when it comes to her career, her reflections are occasionally revealing.
“It’s hard when people see you in a certain light and don’t think you can do anything beyond that,” she says of her struggle to be considered for serious acting roles back in 1980. “I was used to that my whole life, but it didn’t make it any less painful.”
Even for Cher, it seems fame and success have not been straightforward.
Cher: The Memoir, Part Two is due for publication in November 2025.
Authors: Liz Evans, Adjunct Researcher, English and Writing, University of Tasmania 
