Let's Bust a Recap : OTH memoirs

Okay, today's post is a 3-for-the-price-of-1 special and we're talking celebrity memoirs, baby. The funny thing about this genre is that I wouldn't say it's typically my jam, but maybe I'm kidding myself. I was first in line for the Britney Spears memoir last year, and when Bethany Joy Lenz announced Dinner for Vampires, I knew right away that I would definitely be reading it as soon as it came out. 

I feel like I have a lot of groundwork to lay before I can just start talking about these books so let's get into it. 

First of all, I admitted to you on this very blog back in 2017 that I had been sucked into One Tree Hill Land. But to give you even more context: the first friend I made at the tiny little Christian college I went to back in 2006 was a One Tree Hill superfan. Like, literally plastered our suite with posters from the show. So when I finally decided to watch an episode—ten years later—it was all due to her influence. Since watching through all nine seasons back in 2017, I have definitely watched the first few seasons again at various times, always falling off the rewatch before making it to their post-high school lives. I wouldn't call myself a fan, but I appreciate the absolute hit of nostalgia I get just from the music on that show. I feel that giving you my history with One Tree Hill is a bit misleading given that none of these memoirs are technically *about* One Tree Hill, but they're all by girls who were stars of the show and it is because they were stars of the show that I have any awareness of their existence and, by extension, the existence of their memoirs. When Bethany Joy Lenz announced her memoir and started doing all the press for it about her time in a real cult, I immediately added it to my personal TBR and when it finally came out in October, I went to the library and got both of Hilarie Burton's memoirs along with it and read them all back-to-back-to-back. 

So now that you know more than you ever wanted to about how these books came on my radar, let's go through them one-by-one. 

The Rural Diaries by Hilarie Burton Morgan was the first of these memoirs to be published back in May of 2020. During my ill-fated year on the instagram, she was promoting this book hardcore, and consequently, I added it to my amazon wishlist where it has hung out ever since. Now that I am a proud, card-carrying library patron and have figured out the novel concept that I don't actually have to buy every single book I want to read, I took myself down to my local library and checked out both of Burton's books when I went to pick up Lenz's brand-new release. Hilarie describes The Rural Diaries as a love letter to a town, a farm, and a man, and that's really what it is. In it, she tells her story of leaving Hollywood to establish a life in the Hudson Valley on a working farm with her husband Jeffrey Dean Morgan and their son Gus. Hilarie has a real talent for making the people and things in her life that are important to her, feel important and cherished, and that's a real gift. I found myself wanting to visit her candy shop in Rhinebeck and even feeling a little envious of the community she seemingly has built there. I really like how she incorporated pages throughout this memoir with little gardening tips, recipes, and the like, and this is a book I might actually pick up again in future to refer back to some of those things. 

Her second book, Grimoire Girl, was published last year in October of 2023. This one was less of a memoir (in my opinion), and more a collection of essays that heavily emphasize the how-to of living a fulfilling life and being able to leave a meaningful legacy. Burton likes to call herself a witch and she really leans into that in this second book. In Grimoire Girl, Burton writes about topics ranging from the harmless—like the art of letter-writing and keeping a scrapbook—to the more pernicious—like astrology and pagan worship. This book is half benign, half the worst universalist trash I've ever read. If Burton takes an interest or sees beauty in something, she incorporates it into her life in a haphazard and even offensive way, combining Christian and pagan practices willy-nilly with no thought to how these things literally condemn each other. Pretty wild. I would never pick this book up again, and I cannot recommend it.

Dinner for Vampires by Bethany Joy Lenz (who played my favorite character on One Tree Hill) just came out in October, and as the subtitle makes clear, it's all about her life on a cult TV show while also in an actual cult. Kudos to the marketing genius who came up with that. Lenz was part of a high-control group for ten years, and her stated goal in publishing Dinner for Vampires is to show how it doesn't take a stupid or particularly gullible person to fall prey to a situation like this. It was utterly fascinating to read about her experience and the downward spiral she found herself in. I wasn't expecting Dinner for Vampires to be a beautiful portrait of Lenz's journey to cling to her faith and come out the other side of her nightmarish experience with her trust in God still in tact, but that's exactly what it was. It was hard to read at times but ultimately quite moving for me as a person of faith myself. 

A post like this, covering three highly personal memoirs, just scratches the surface of so many potential topics to discuss. Obviously the intersection of faith and celebrity culture; cults in general; the amount of made-for-TV Christmas movies I have watched starring Hilarie Burton and Bethany Joy Lenz since finishing their memoirs (five, as of today); the potential Burton/Lenz feud that has the internet buzzing (is it real or is this some kind of trumped up marketing tactic to boost book sales?); how social media and being able to have pseudo-personal access to celebrities' lives affects the culture and the release of memoirs like this—I could go on and on. And my brother will attest to the fact that we have spent hours on the phone dissecting crap like that. But those are blog posts for another day...or possibly another blog altogether because I generally stick to the books I'm reading around here. But if you want to get into it, I'm so here for those conversations. 

To wrap things up, I might recommend The Rural Diaries and Dinner for Vampires with a strong content warning for bad language. Do not come crying to me if you pick either of these up on my recommendation and realize you are in for a lot of F-words. Like I alluded to at the beginning of this post, celebrity memoir seems like kindof a niche genre and I would think you'd need to be really interested in the subject matter to pick one up. 

How about you? Do you like celebrity memoirs? Or have you ever read one based solely on the fact that the celebrity in question was part of a project you liked?