Top-selling celebrity memoirs you need to read

Part memoir, part self-help book, Brooke, 60, documents the realities of being middle aged. Not just as a woman, but also as a celebrity who has been famous for her looks since childhood. “At fifty-nine, I feel more confident than I ever have. I’m more comfortable in my skin and have stopped comparing myself to this ideal or worrying about that expectation. Even as I’m experiencing this newfound sense of satisfaction, I have to remind myself, sometimes daily, that I am good enough.”

At 970 pages, Barbra Streisand’s 2023 memoir is not short on details. The singer-actor, 83, recalls deciding as a young woman, “I have to become famous so I can get somebody else to make my bed.” On her directorial debut for the movie Yentl, she shares a bizarre story about fellow actor Mandy Patinkin, now 72, who became “angry and rude”. She took him aside and he confessed he thought she’d hired him because she wanted to have an affair. “I looked at him as if he were crazy.” She says Mandy cried and “I said, ‘Mandy this kind of behaviour can’t continue. I’m prepared to replace you. We’re only two weeks in. I can reshoot all your scenes if you can’t be more professional.’”

With her father’s “abusive” conservatorship finally pushed aside. Britney, 43, wasted little time exorcising her demons in The Woman in Me. The singer revealed she took Prozac to cope with fame as a teenager and had a secret abortion in the ’00s after falling pregnant to Justin Timberlake, now 44. Of her years under her conservatorship, she wrote she was, “Too sick to choose my own boyfriend, and yet somehow healthy enough to appear on sitcoms and morning shows, and to perform for thousands of people in a different part of the world every week. I know I had been acting wild, but there was nothing I’d done that justified their treating me like I was a bank robber.”

Some lives are just too big to fit into one memoir. Instead, Cher has written two – the second being released in November. The Believe singer spills on a dyslexic childhood to her marriage to Sony Bono, with plenty of romances in between. Cher, 79, recalls meeting John Lennon and US singer Harry Nilsson at a restaurant in 1974 and inviting them to join her for movie night at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. John and Harry were roaring drunk. Before Cher knew it, they were standing naked in the middle of the infamous Grotto. “They threatened to wander around the mansion naked. It took me ages to get them back in their clothes.”

The Happy Days actor shares the pain of his humiliating childhood, due to his undiagnosed learning difficulties. Henry, 79, went on to have a respected Hollywood career and has learned to never let his dyslexia hold him back. “Somebody suggested I become a producer. I started off saying, ‘I can’t do it, I’m dyslexic,’ and finally you say, ‘Oh, just shut up and try.’”

Before her sudden death in 2023, Lisa Marie had begun work on her memoir. After her death, aged 54, her daughter Riley, 36, finished it. Thanks to the hours of in-depth interviews Lisa Marie had recorded for the project. The memoir goes behind the more salacious headlines of her life. Including her marriage to Michael Jackson and her fractured relationship with her mother Priscilla. But it’s also a moving portrait of the grief that marked Lisa Marie’s life. From the trauma of watching her dad Elvis’ lifeless body being wheeled out of Graceland when she was only nine years old, to the sudden death of her son Ben. Lisa Marie writes, “The sadness started at nine when he died and it never left.” Riley adds, “She was heartbroken my whole life.”