What to Look for in a Celebrity Memoir

New York Times

4 days ago

When 'The Andy Warhol Diaries' was first published in 1989, Warner Books released it without an index. This drove a small but influential segment of its target audience — people who were, or hoped they might be, in it — absolutely nuts, since they had to rifle through 807 pages to see if they warranted a mention.
It also didn't help the snoopy non-V. I.P. reader who wanted to browse for gossip about their favorite stars. Soon enough Spy magazine stepped in, publishing an 'Exclusive Unauthorized Index' to what its cover called 'All the Random Bitchiness in Andy Warhol's Published Diaries.'
Flip forward 36 years, to this spring. That's when Graydon Carter, the editor of Spy when the Warhol book was published, now better known for his quarter-century running Vanity Fair, published his own memoir. Without an index.
Disappointingly, there wasn't all that much bitchiness in his book, 'When the Going Was Good,' and what was there was hard to find. In recent months it was followed by two other index-free memoirs from veteran New York power brokers: 'I Regret Almost Everything,' by the restaurateur Keith McNally, and 'Who Knew,' by the mogul Barry Diller. Together, the three books comprise more than 1,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of different slices of elite life all without a dramatis personae of who mattered.
I regret their absence, because indexes in this kind of book provide a road map to American power. Noting who gets mentioned on how many pages, and who reappears in how many other books, charts the spider web of influence in which modern life traps us all. Readers who download digital versions of the books can, I suppose, use the search function to look for names that might interest them. But these are books you are supposed to tote around in public — take to the beach, carry on the plane — to show that you're in the know.
Whether reading for work or pleasure, I'm a Luddite who prefers an old-fashioned printed book. Nothing about the digital experience can replace the pleasure of sitting among a stack of books propped open at certain pages, or bristling with torn, scrap-paper bookmarks, like the whiskers of an old cat.
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