Jade: Catch A Falling Star by Jade Goody
Friday, 07 Nov 2008 09:27
Jade: Catch A Falling Star by Jade Goody
John Blake Publishing, 174 pp, £18.99.
In a nutshell...
Candid, sordid, frank, funny and absorbing.
What's it all about?
Jade Goody is only 27 years old and is famous for being famous, yet she already has two autobiographies to her name. What has happened since her first in 2006? The answer is two very big events that have provided an endless amount of tabloid fodder. The first was of course her notorious appearance in Celebrity Big Brother in January 2007, when she was accused of racially bullying Shilpa Shetty. At the centre of this book seems to be Jade's quest to clear her name, by going right back to her troubled childhood and uncontrollable temper and explaining what happened in the house. The second big event was being diagnosed with cervical cancer in the Indian Big Brother house. This detail is chucked on as an afterthought in the Prologue and Afterword, obviously because Jade did not know about her illness when the book was being written.
Who's it by?>
Jade Goody shot to fame in 2002 after taking part in the third series of Big Brother. Despite the fact that she only came fourth, she is widely considered to be the most famous reality TV star in the UK. Since taking part in the Channel 4 show, Jade has had plenty of magazine and TV work and has also launched two perfumes in her name. She has two sons, Bobby and Freddy, with her ex-boyfriend Jeff Brazier.
Her autobiography has been ghost-written by Heat magazine features editor, Lucie Cave, who does a formidable job of allowing the star's voice to shine through, although the little Jadeisms that pepper the text come a little too thick and fast to be palatable and make the narrative seem terribly contrived.
As an example...
"I can't help my face, that's just the way I was born."
"But, of course, I'm thick as s*** aren't I?"
"My dear mum put her foot in it again. For some ridiculous reason she told a newspaper that when I was younger she used to clean my face with piss! I opened the Daily Star to see the headline 'Jade's Sick Wee Secret – Big Brother Star's Face Wiped Clean with Dirty Nappies'."
"I've come to realise that Jack's a completely different person when he's had a drink. It's like he is that Jekyll and Clyde character (someone told me the other day it's actually 'Hyde' but I think 'Clyde' sounds more like a name myself)."
Likelihood of becoming a Hollywood blockbuster
Well hopefully if Jade has anything to do with it because she makes a shameless plea for an acting career in the middle of the book: "You might remember in my last book I spoke about my grand ideas about breaking into Hollywood. Well, it might still seem like a silly dream to some people but it's still what I'd like to do more than anything." Jade goes on to reveal that she explained her aspirations to Samuel L Jackson once and he told her to go for it and look him up the next time she was in LA. But nothing seems to have come of that, so if there are any Hollywood agents out there, do drop her a line.
What the others say
"There's so little self-consciousness, so little image control, so little hope in this book that it's like watching a bullfight in which the bull thinks it's the matador and that the picadors are its friends." – Guardian
"She has managed to stay famous for six years not because she confirms stereotypes about individuals from the truly benighted end of the working class, but because she subverts them constantly." – New Statesman
So is it any good
It has to be said that Jade's second autobiography is extremely addictive, but only for the first half of the book. The race row with Shilpa Shetty is particularly interesting given that Jade was completely vilified by the press and we have never really heard her side of the story. Although the disjointed temporal structure of the book is mildly irritating – she constantly flits between the recent past and her childhood with genius chapter titles like "Re-re-wind" – it has clearly been done in order to convince the reader that her argument with Shilpa over an Oxo cube in 2007 was the culmination of years of anger and insecurity. We are invited to believe that it wasn't her fault that she completely flew off the handle – it's because she sees red whenever she hears a lie (in this case that Oxo cubes were the only thing that she had ordered on the shopping list). It doesn't matter how small or big the lie is, all Jade thinks about when she hears lies is how her mother and father, who were both drug addicts, used to lie to her about whether they had been using. Whether the reader chooses to sympathise with that explanation or not is up to them, but one cannot deny that Jade did have a very difficult start in life - two heroin-addicted parents, a father in and out of jail, a boyfriend who used to beat her up and the responsibility of becoming a carer for her mum after she had a motorcycle accident. By delving into her past, Jade partially achieves her aim of winning back the public's affection. Is it enough to warrant her behaviour in the Celebrity Big Brother house? Again, it is up to the reader to decide but Jade certainly makes a strong case for saying that she is not a racist. A bully, certainly, but not a racist. In this respect, I would say that Jade achieves what she set out to do with the book. But after this part is cleared up, it becomes far more boring. Tedious tales of her turbulent love-life with on-off boyfriend Jack Tweed, who is currently serving a jail sentence of 18 months for assaulting a 16-year-old boy with a golf club, are tolerable at first but soon become dreary. Ditto with regard to her bitter encounters with Danielle Lloyd, nights out at Embassy and general celebrity misdemeanors.
As well as the inner circle of family and friends, there are some unexpected characters in Jade's book. Osama bin Laden makes several appearances, apparently a measure of infinite evil, and Jade's hair extensions appear to have been her chief concern over the past year given the amount of text they receive.
But apart from the spells of dullness, Jade's book is definitely an illuminating insight into the crazy, intrusive world of a celebrity whose entire fortune was created and very nearly destroyed by the same media construct. Nothing is sacred in Jade's life, no subject is off limits and your PR is your best friend in the whole world.
5/10
Natasha Hegde
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