Celebrity Aesthetic Book Clubs

Eve Babitz for Spring? Groundbreaking.

Hello, reader. I am stressed. A ball of stress even, with little rat fingers gnarled into claws. It’s a wonder that I can even type with this level of gnarlment. My chin is a Vesuvial wonderland of cystic spots (literal worrywarts!) and the less said about the state of my laundry basket, the better.

I find it hard to read in times of stress. The words don’t go in because the concentrating part of my brain wanders off to look at spreadsheets with numbers on them, and the numbers go “I may just be a series of digits but I am also capable of expressing your innermost fears, and everyone can see how big those chin spots are”.

I am almost 37 years old. You’d think chin spots would abate before middle age, but apparently not.

ANYWAY. This is a book newsletter and not a Clearasil ad (please sponsor me, Clearasil!) so let’s stick to the subject. I was going to give you a list of things I’d read two pages of before The Numbers reared their non-sequential heads, but that would be boring.*

The advent of celebrities as product pushers has long been a source of fascination to me, especially if the product line is considerably off-brand. Kate Moss has to be reminded to wear SPF by her daughter and smokes, by her own admission, like a gorgeous chimney, so her skincare line seems a little, er, incongruous. It has a whiff of the vaginal jade egg about it (not literally).

Slightly less incongruous is the celebrity book club. Said c’leb is usually a willowy white lady whose usual tastemaking beat is fashion (see: Dua Lipa, Emma Roberts, Kaia Gerber). The marriage of intellect and aesthetics as a sort of credibility upgrade has been written about in a much more coherent way elsewhere. I am just here to take the piss.

So let’s take a look at some of these book clubs, shall we?