Super Thursday, the biggest publishing day of the year, falls this week, heralding the start of the pre-Christmas bookselling period. This is when publishers launch their biggest titles, the celebrity autobiographies for which they have paid big advances. It has always been a frenzied time, but with more titles than ever moved to this end of the year, this time out it really is super-charged.
The season kicked off with “the biggest publishing launch in history” for Stephen Fry’s (third) autobiography More Fool Me (Michael Joseph, £25), promoted via a one-man show simultaneously broadcast in hundreds of cinemas in the UK and around the world. A highly entertaining book, it has a refreshing, raw honesty: Fry seems almost coy in parts, self-consciously apologising for stories repeated from the first two volumes of his memoirs.
He shouldn’t be embarrassed, because there’s no such thing as a single-instalment memoir anymore. After the success of Going to Sea in a Sieve, Danny Baker is back with Going Off Alarming (W&N, £18.99), featuring “the bits he forgot when writing volume one” (as one early Amazon review puts it). Like Fry, Baker gets away with this reboot by being great company and a brilliant raconteur.
Another welcome second act from a “national treasure” is Clare Balding’s Walking Home: My Family and Other Rambles (Viking, £20). Based on her walks along 1,500 miles of UK footpaths for the radio series Ramblings, this is a clever take on Balding’s life and career. Her passion and natural congeniality make the book work.
The same is true of Anjelica Huston’s Watch Me (Simon & Schuster, £20): it picks up where A Story Lately Told leaves off, chronicling her Hollywood years and the death of her father, the film director John Huston.
Graham Norton has left a respectable 10-year gap between volumes. Life and Loves of a He-Devil (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) moves on from his funny, self-deprecating first book So Me by taking a tour round his “favourites” list. “By telling my stories through the prism of my passions, I hope you will get an insight into my life,” writes Norton.
In Only When I Laugh: My Autobiography (Ebury, £20), Paul Merton expertly mines his “working-class Fulham childhood”, hit-and-miss attempts to get into comedy and a “manic episode” that landed him in the Maudsley hospital.
John Cleese’s So Anyway… (Random House, £20) is the long-awaited story of the actor’s life, told how he wants to tell it (“how a tall, shy youth from Weston-super-Mare went on to become a self-confessed legend”). Another celebrity who has been in no hurry to get her life down on paper is Vivienne Westwood (Picador, £25). A collaboration between Westwood and the biographer Ian Kelly, the book covers a lot of ground the designer has previously been reluctant to address.
Want something warm and likable? A major contender is Reverend Richard Coles’s Fathomless Riches: Or How I Went From Pop to Pulpit (W&N, £20), a candid account of the journey from choirboy to Communard, from the only vicar in Britain to have had a No 1 hit. There’s also Dermot O’Leary’s The Soundtrack to My Life (Hodder & Stoughton, £20), a life story told through the X Factor presenter’s favourite songs.
For a traditional rock star memoir, Billy Idol’s Dancing With Myself (Simon & Schuster, £20) takes some beating, from seeing the Sex Pistols for the first time and starting his own punk band to becoming a massive star and acquiring the matching drug habit. A typical quote? “After a while, my nose became so bloody that I reverted to smoking coke instead. From there, it was all downhill.”
A less predictable rollercoaster ride is John Waters’s “it-is-what-it-sounds-like” travel memoir, Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America (Corsair, £16.99), which has earned rave reviews in the US. Elsewhere, drummer Mick Fleetwood takes a break from 46 years of life on the road in Play On: Now, Then and Fleetwood Mac (Hodder & Stoughton, £20).The book covers his upbringing in Cornwall, the 1960s rock scene, his friendship with George Harrison and his love affair with Stevie Nicks.
For a whistlestop tour of recent political history and the inside story of a media career, look no further than Right or Wrong, The Memoirs of Lord Bell (Bloomsbury Continuum, £25), in which Tim Bell, co-founder of Saatchi & Saatchi, sits you next to Ronald Reagan, Rupert Murdoch and David Frost.
Ayoade on Ayoade: A Cinematic Odyssey by The IT Crowd’s Richard Ayoade (Faber, £14.99) promises to do for film-making what Stewart Lee’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate did for standup comedy. Equally insightful but immersed in the world of poetry is Wendy Cope’s Life, Love and The Archers: Recollections, Reviews and Other Prose (Two Roads, £16.99), described as “a book for anyone who’s ever fallen in love, tried to give up smoking, or consoled themselves that they’ll never be quite as old as Mick Jagger”. Which is also close to every publisher’s description of the Super Thursday target market: everyone who ever bought a book.
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