Making sure fame counts

The singer Charlotte Church has signed a £500,000 book deal for her memoirs. Charlotte Church is 14

The singer Charlotte Church has signed a £500,000 book deal for her memoirs. Charlotte Church is 14. What next? A TV nostalgia-fest in which Samantha Mumba reminisces about the old days? Westlife as the subject of a four-part History Channel series? A "rolling back the years" book and video on the life and times of Brooklyn Beckham? Who knows? But a "memoir" from a 14-year-old tells us truths about publishing, showbiz and even childhood at the start of the 21st century.

In fact, you can be sure that the simple fact of such a "memoir" tells us more about publishing, showbiz and childhood than the content of it will. A British Sunday newspaper reported that people who have seen an early draft of Church's ghostwritten book, Voice Of An Angel, consider it "gushing". They're probably being too kind. Now that so much book publishing has prostituted itself to PR, we risk drowning in torrents of saccharine mush projectile-vomited at the gullible.

Time was when the characteristic voice of a memoir was measured and reflective. It was a form which issued from at least a reasonably long perspective, in which time, if nothing else, guaranteed an expanded context, although it wasn't necessary to be retired, doddering or to know that you had, perhaps, only a year to live. Indeed an avalanche of memoirs - the best of them quite brilliant - from young adult and middle-aged writers cascaded through the 1990s.

Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, Jung Chang's Wild Swans, Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father?, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Nuala O' Faolain's Are You Somebody? and dozens of others made ordinary lives memoir-able through a combination of factors. As in all mass media, tell-all confessionalism (Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, about her incestuous relationship with her father, topped American best-seller lists) was frequently a major element. Lyrical prose and an end-of-the-century urge to look back also made memoir a "hot" (or even "cool" - depending on your abuse of language) genre, displacing much literary fiction because of its claims to factual truth about real people.

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As such, it had the "reality factor" which Big Brother successfully exploited on television. Along with literary memoirs, there came a glut of sentimental efforts and others which were merely sordid or vacuous "confessions". Former drug-addicts, criminals, football hooligans, ne'er-do-wells and embarrassingly eager self-publicists cashed-in on the public appetite for frankness and revelation.

Self-styled "outlaws" saw the writing on the cheques and aimed to supply what publishers wanted. The memoir-boom, like all booms, attracted wannabe outlaws, most of whom were really just cowboys - Jerry Springer exhibitionists in print instead of on screen. "So many people grassing on themselves," observed Will Self and he should know. Typically however, showbiz memoirs remained the most trite of all. They usually have been. But, even for saccharine mush posing as a memoir, 14 is absurdly young. That is not to say that the real, human voice (as opposed to the unreal, angelic one) of a young teenager can have nothing to say. Without doubt, it can. Anne Frank proved that. As time passes, the distance between childhood and adulthood grows more difficult to bridge and memory becomes more fallible. The closer range of a younger person recording or looking back can have advantages, especially for accuracy.

Yet we know that, as with the most stage-managed chat shows, when there's a half-a-million quid deal done, chances are we will be stitched-up by "celebrity culture". It is partly readers' resentment at being treated like slavering morons which condones the slasher biographies from hatchet-job hacks such as Kitty Kelley and Albert Goldman. There's so much mush that mean-spiritedness becomes its inevitable shadow and proportion gets distorted from all directions. From politics to publishing, it often seems that there's no business but showbusiness.

So we end up with soundbite culture in the media and time itself gets packaged in ever-tinier chunks. It is as if the disposable society, in which cars are to changed every two years, personal computers become antiques in one and mountains of rubbish grow, because there's no place to dispose of all the junk which results from casting shopping as a "leisure activity", has invaded not just human culture, but human life itself. Church won't always be a child prodigy, so her "memoir" had better capitalise on her disposable popularity while contracting public memory remembers who she is.

Historically, the problem for many child prodigies has not been so much that they can't last as child prodigies for ever, but that they can't ever have childhoods. Shirley Temple and Jodie Foster prospered but consider Judy Garland, Lena Zavaroni and Michael Jackson (still seeking childhood in his 40s). Macaulay Culkin (in giving him that name, it should have been obvious that his parents had a bad attitude) also feels scarred by his early mega-fame. But increasingly, it's not just child stars who are having their childhood stolen.

Consumerism targets kids so relentlessly nowadays that they too are being turned into customers first and children by the way. You can't blame the kids. Biologically blueprinted to want, want, want, they are assaulted by commercial and cultural stimuli to amplify natural impulses to unnatural levels. The archetypal American "brat", produced by hucksters' desires on parents' pockets, has been exported to the rest of the wealthy world. So, while it's only natural that children want and parents want to give - or, at least, be able to afford to give - them a Sony PlayStation 2, it becomes such a vicious circle that, for some, the wants ultimately become insatiable.

Sure, it's easy and often justified to parody sermonising, poor-mouth guff about "when we were kids, 35 of us knocked more sport out of an old tyre than you do out of a 35-gear mountain bike . . . ". Memory is, after all, fallible and age has a habit of masking resentment as heroic by deepening the tint of even the rosiest-tinted specs. That's the point of nostalgia, which is a human yearning to denounce the only reality: the present. Yet it still seems fair to say that there's seldom a simple proportional relationship between the amount of happiness produced and the amount of money spent.

It's not just consumer culture which is shortening childhood. Inevitable spillovers from the media's targeting of adult prurience, chasing ratings and sales through ever more lurid, tell-all confessionalism, also have an impact on children. You can have all the laws, TV watersheds, Net nannies and brown paper bags you like, but you can't hermetically seal kids from the overall culture. Indeed to attempt to, can inflict worse damage on them.

We know that this state ought to be deeply ashamed of its treatment of many of the most vulnerable children of earlier generations. But even though the gulags are mostly empty now, it's still far from rosy in this cynical age when prefab boybands and girlbands sing essentially for children. Affluence produced teenagers, then teenyboppers, then weenyboppers. How long before we get nappyboppers?

The Sunday supplements carry ads for Georgio Armani outfits for infants and in the mass market, schoolkids feel inadequate without the "hot" or "cool" (take your pick) trainers or if their parents drive the "wrong" car. Children wearing cheaper clothes are at greater risk of being bullied by their peers, themselves bullied by a value system they are unable to resist. Perhaps it was always like this but certainly not on the scale it is now.

The saddest aspect of all is that accelerated fad culture may not be a fad itself. Once expectations are raised and stimulated through advertising and a sense of values, which promotes avarice, it's practically impossible to stop the nonsense. How would you feel if you were a teacher today and a five-year-old pitched up for class in Georgio Armani gear? If you couldn't see connections between society's value of your pupil and society's value of yourself, you'd be in the wrong job. If you could, you'd know you were in the wrong job. Anyway, back to Charlotte Church and her "memoirs'. "This must be postmodernist irony," literary agent Giles Gordon told Britain's Sunday Times. "Showbiz memoirs generally sell, while books of people who really matter, don't." Well, it's not postmodernist irony although it might be postmodernist (if anybody knows just what the word might mean!) cynicism. Certainly, it's an example of multimedia manipulation: you've bought the CD, now buy the book of the same name. Presumably the biopic awaits as accountants calculate the sums to assess projected profitability.

It's not simply about the supply and demand that the market apologists claim. It's about supplying a manufactured demand, milking it and moving on to the next scam. The process is glorified as "marketing" and so it goes. Charlotte Church, Britain's youngest millionaire, already has an estimated £10 million, accumulated through the appeal of her singing voice. Fair enough. She sang for free at Rupert Murdoch's wedding. The angel, seemingly, has been advised on media angles too - talk about singing for your supper.

Perhaps you consider it unfair to prejudge her "memoir" because of her age and the reports about its gushing style and tone. But last month she told London's Time Out magazine that the Duke of Edinburgh, Phil "The Greek" Mountbatten, is really cool because he's always up for "a bit of a laugh and a joke". Furthermore, she doesn't believe he's "intentionally racist" and reckons he deserves some leeway because he's "old now". Stick to the singing, Ms Church.

Because of showbiz and marketing, the "voice of an angel" gets published, while the voices of humans with something to say are left mute. There may not be many better sopranos in the world but there are innumerable better stories. Considering that one of the songs which has made Charlotte Church's reputation is Amazing Grace, there's a truly amazing lack of grace about the idea of this 14-year-old's memoir. You can't blame the kid, but it marks a 21st-century swan song for childhood in a generic as well as a personal sense.