The Political Memoir is the Year's Hottest Book Genre
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Fifteen years ago, the once powerful book publisher Judith Regan, ruler of her own imprint at Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins, embarked on a project of dubious distinction. Somehow she convinced O.J. Simpson to get on board with a mea culpa manqué about the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. It would be called If I Did It, and it had the makings of a blockbuster.
Regan had made a name for herself with other explosive confessionals, including works by Howard Stern, Jose Canseco, and Jenna Jameson, but this was of another order. An anointed star in Murdoch’s gallery of rogues, Regan knew this was one editorial coup that ticked all the mogul’s boxes: scandal, controversy, sales, and corporate synergy (the book would be published in conjunction with a television special on Fox). She was right: Her get became a sensation, but not in the way she expected.
Criticism poured in, Fox affiliate stations revolted, and the boss, in a rare show of humility, pulled the plug, stung by accusations of craven vulgarity. Eventually Murdoch fired Regan; she sued, getting a $10.75 million settlement; and the Simpson book became a best-seller, rebranded by the Goldman family with a much more apropos subtitle: Confessions of the Killer. Regan says she has no regrets. The human appetite for celebrity self-abasement and atonement, the raw materials of the well-turned tell-all, is unquenchable.
“Everyone loves a good memoir. It’s a genre that will never die,” she says. “Even the most despicable person has the right to tell their story.”
Well, the new year is about to put Regan’s prophecy to the test. At a time when redemption is in the air, former Trump administration officials and adjacent untouchables are getting ready for their close-ups with the last shreds of currency they have left: information, the more tantalizing and eyebrow-raising the better. They saw the book deals and sales of the first (and second and third) wave of blabbermouths, everyone from James Comey and John Bolton to Trump’s very own niece Mary, and they want a slice of the indiscretion abbondanza, even if the only road to laundering their reputations is betrayal.
The late spinmeister Howard Rubenstein, who died in December, invented the modern art of image rehabilitation, and he understood that the most powerful arrow in the quivers of today’s crooks, grifters, and ne’er-do-wells is their personal stories, warts and all. Despite the surfeit of digital dish on offer—scroll all the way down for your hot tips cheat sheet, from @Deuxmoi to The Hollywood Fix—the time-honored memoir, as analog as an old-school gossip like Louella Parsons filing her copy over a rotary phone, allows disgraced personalities to control their narratives, and, if they’re successful, earn back squandered trust.
“F. Scott Fitzgerald got it wrong when he said that there are no second acts in American life,” says amateur literary critic Anthony Scaramucci, who parlayed his 11 days as White House communications director in 2017 into Trump: The Blue-Collar President. “America loves a comeback story.”
At least, members of Trump’s inner circle are hoping that’s the case. Just as tarnished Nixon-era figures H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Henry Kissinger, and John Dean rushed out books in the wake of Watergate, Kellyanne Conway, the cartoon villain Trump mouthpiece turned counselor, is rumored to be shopping her frontline tales as part of a rehabilitation tour, as are several of her former colleagues, including Vice President Mike Pence; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; chiefs of staff Mick Mulvaney and John Kelly; press secretary Kayleigh McEnany; European Union ambassador Gordon Sondland; and campaign manager Brad Parscale.
“It’s become a cottage industry,” says Douglas Brinkley, the historian and author of The Reagan Diaries. “A lot of people are trying to polish their records and get rid of the ragged edges to somehow make themselves profiles in courage at the end of the Trump years. They’re all going to try to come out of it as a heroine or hero of the political circus around them.”
Apart from the Liz Cheneys and Adam Kinzingers of the world (two Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, the second time), Brinkley says we should expect to see a slew of book deals for members of Congress caught in the attempted insurrection in January.
“I guarantee you these congresspeople will want to tell their own personal stories of terror, where they hid in the Capitol and how they decided whether to impeach Trump or not,” he says. “It’ll be used as a vehicle for their future careers.” What say you, Ted Cruz?
Which is not to say that all of these newcomers to public opprobrium have stories worth telling beyond cable television news (Hilaria Baldwin, por favor, pay attention). Scaramucci’s book, for instance, never made it to the best-seller list, selling only 36,325 copies, according to NPD BookScan.
“The first thing any publisher thinks is, ‘Who’s the audience? Who’s going to buy this book?’ ” says literary agent David Kuhn, who has engineered a few attention-grabbing exposés, such as the late Scotty Bowers’s delicious kiss-and-tell about classic Hollywood. “There’s a big difference between the media wanting to talk to you and customers wanting to spend $30 on a book.”
That is a lesson for members of all political parties, from First Son Hunter Biden, whose addiction memoir is out this April, to Ivanka and Melania Trump, should they find a way out of the nondisclosure agreements they are no doubt bound by. In order to emulate the success of Michelle Obama, whose memoir, Becoming, is one of the best-selling books of the past decade, or to match the enormous advances reaped by such tattletales as John Bolton (who is said to have received $2 million up front for his efforts), they are going to have to deliver relatable insights beyond, say, Barron Trump’s first crush or Jared Kushner’s skincare secrets.
“The bar is higher for celebrity books these days,” Kuhn says. “Just dishing, even if the dish is good—and that’s a big if—isn’t enough. Whatever it is will be online within five hours of the book announcement. What really matters is the emotional arc and how the story resonates with the reader on a personal level.”
Certainly the most successful and gripping trips down memoiry lane—and good ones have come from everyone from Ulysses S. Grant to Lauren Bacall to Andre Agassi—seduce readers with soul searching (and baring) that makes the jump from the autobiographical to the universal.
“These books are really hard to pull off,” says Lizzie Grubman, the publicist who infamously went to jail for running her SUV into a crowd outside a Hamptons nightclub in 2002. She says she resisted numerous entreaties to write about the incident. “In my experience most people think they are smarter than they are—including me.”
These days there is no guarantee that even the deftest of these offerings will find a respectable home. As canned authors Milo Yiannopoulos, Woody Allen, and, most recently, Senator Josh Hawley, have found out, publishers run the risk of having staff uprisings on their hands when they commit to books by names who have fallen afoul of the public.
Add to that the very real chance of marquee writers already on their rosters quitting in protest, and it becomes a simple business imperative to relegate these reprobates to imprints on the lunatic fringe.
Of course, beyond genuinely fascinating and notoriously guarded characters like Anthony Fauci and Robert Mueller, the one person who stands to receive a whopping advance regardless of whatever pap he commits to paper is Donald J. Trump himself. But buyer beware: Murdoch’s HarperCollins once published a personal finance book by pre-presidency Trump, and it didn’t age well. In his 2015 financial disclosure form, Trump declared that in the course of 18 months Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life did neither, bringing in less than $201.
Murdoch knows all too well the risks of putting commerce over journalism. Forty years ago his august Sunday Times of London raced to publish the scoop of the century, the handwritten diaries of Adolf Hitler. When Hugh Trevor-Roper (aka Baron Dacre), the respected historian who had initially vouched for the documents, backtracked, Murdoch was warned by his editors about the questionable validity of the artifact. His response surprised a lot of people, though not those who knew him best. “Fuck Dacre,” he said. “Publish.”
The so-called “Hitler Diaries” became one of the most embarrassing episodes in the history of publishing, a hoax that stained the reputations of all involved, including the mighty tycoon. That’s a mistake he’s not likely to repeat anytime soon, not with a president notorious for his whoppers.
This story appears in the March 2021 issue of Town & Country.
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