This week, Lost in Showbiz arrives bearing important news for the intellectuals among its readership: no, it can’t imagine there are many of them either, but let’s press on. Thinkers and scholars, stop whatever it is that you’re doing! Put down that copy of the Paris Review, cease making notes in the margin of The Kreutzer Sonata, press pause on that podcast about triangulation and the intersections between languages and literary traditions. Pray silence, bibliophiles, for the literary event of the year is upon us: Katie Price has published her ninth novel, and Lost in Showbiz couldn’t be more excited.
Yes, there are those who churlishly make a song and dance about the fact that Price doesn’t actually write her novels, who raise a knowing eyebrow when the question of authorship crops up in interviews (“Have you always channelled your life into your books?” “Not completely.”). It can only direct them to the recent interview in which, challenged to prove she could actually write, Price came up with the opening paragraph to a novel: “I’m sitting on a swing in the garden with the wind hitting my face and the grass freshly cut and it smelled nice. I had my hair in pigtails with red bows with bright polka dots, with suspenders on and no knickers. And I lifted the dishwasher open and it smelled like wet labradors.”
I know, I know: Lost in Showbiz thought it could detect the influence of James Joyce too. But let us not get bogged down in the finicky minutae of lit crit and instead move onto the most important matter at hand. If Katie Price is publishing a novel, that means Katie Price is having an event at which she launches her novel – and there’s almost nothing in the world Lost in Showbiz loves more than an event at which Price launches something: masterclasses in dignity and subtle product placement one and all. It recalls with fondness the launch of her personalized iPod range, at which Price appeared with a selection of iPods strapped to her head. Its eyes grow misty at the very memory of the ColourB4 Hair Remover launch, at which Price appeared with several packets of Colour B4 Hair Remover strapped to her head. More than anything, it thinks back to the launch of her last novel, In The Name of Love, at which Price first appeared on a live, rearing black stallion while dressed in an orange satin bikini and matching mantilla, then announced to the assembled journalists that she’d once stuck a vodka bottle up her former husband Alex Reid’s bum.
The bar is clearly set very high indeed, and at first, Lost In Showbiz confesses, it was initially a trifle underwhelmed by the launch of Make My Wish Come True. Of course, it couldn’t help but think of the novelists who might learn a thing or two from Price’s launch party outfit of white fishnet stockings, feathered cape, Perspex platform shoes and a large wand, Will Self and Julian Barnes among them. But that aside, an air of “meh” clung to the event: nothing strapped to her head. Again: nothing strapped to her head, no horse, no news about anything being stuck up anyone’s bum.
But as it turned out, this was simply evidence of a new approach on the part of Britain’s leading lady of letters. The launch itself was merely the hors d’ouevre, un petit amuse-gueule: the meat course was the round of interviews Price subsequently conducted, a treasure-trove of information for anyone keen to peer deep inside the mind of the great word-painter. To the famous literary journal Star magazine, she offered a thought-provoking list of her favourite books: Harold Shipman: Prescription For Murder, Girl A – The Truth About The Rochdale Sex Ring, Christine McGuire and Carla Norton’s depiction of the kidnapping, torture and sexual assault of Colleen Stan, Perfect Victim, and Fred and Rose: The Full Story Of Fred and Rose West and The Gloucester House of Horrors. This casts a new light on what evenings might be like Chez Price: a light meal, a quick visit to Twitter to post some of her famously oblique thoughts on her husband Kieran’s infidelities – “Jane Pountney is a baggy fanny” etc – an involving chat about the dismemberment techniques used by the “Butcher Of Hanover” Fritz Harmann, then bed.
But the real news – the vodka bottle suppository moment, if you will – came in the Mirror, where Price revealed that Oscar Pistorius contacted her during his trial over the shooting of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, sending her direct messages on Twitter, the contents of which Price described as “general chit chat”. Apparently Pistorius contacted her after reading her magazine column, which Lost in showbiz can’t help but feel raises some intriguing questions, not least: hang on, her column in Now Magazine? Pistorius took time out during his trial for murder to read Now Magazine? What else did he do with his downtime while waiting for justice to be served? Watch Geordie Shore? Visit Mail Online to see which members of the Towie cast left little to the imagination as they flaunted their curves? Were Price’s Twitter messages from Pistorius part of a wider campaign by the paralympian to drum up support among the denizens of the British gossip mags? Was he also Snapchatting with Dane Bowers and sending texts to Kym Marsh? Perhaps we shall never know the answers: either way, the Pistorius/Price DM chat should surely be filed next to vodka-bottle-up-the-bumgate, as evidence of the sheer uniqueness of the career of Britain’s greatest novelist.
