In the know. In the now

You don't need to be old and wise to pen a memoir. Celeb tell-alls are telling it all, right when we want to read about it. It's history being told as it is made

- Christalle Fernandes

Two decades ago, when Paris Hilton released her glitzy, ditzy memoir, Confessions of An Heiress, critics and haters went wild. The press called it "almost witty", "vapid", "insensitive". They missed that it was tongue-in-chic (The publisher's pun, not ours. They put it on the cover). Who said memoirs had to be doddering tomes written only by nearly dead people, anyway?

The genre is brimming with books by the young and the famous. Soha Ali Khan's 2017 memoir, The Perils of Being Moderately Famous, takes a light-hearted but necessary look at what it's like to be on the fringes of fame. Mindy Kaling's Is Everybody Hanging Out Without Me? (2011), tackles the comedian's experiences with being Brown, ordinary-looking, a writer and an actor. It's honest and hilarious. Karan Johar talks about losing his virginity in his 2016 book, An Unsuitable Boy. Malini Agarwal, founder of Miss Malini, and influencer Masoom Minawala have both written about how they shot to fame.