“The House of the Unsaid”, by RuPaul
In 1992, RuPaul, drag queen, activist, rose to the rank of phenomenon thanks to the title Supermodel (You Better Work). In just three decades, he established himself as the king of pop culture and entertainmentin the United States and in the rest of the world. A visionary, he was the one who launched the RuPaul’s Drag Racenow adapted in France: a reality TV show in which drag queens compete in various artistic events to obtain the title of superstar.
In his witty biography, he recounts his journey from homelessness to the dizzying heights of stardom via the punk scene. And like a good autobiography is never written without some settling of scores, RuPaul describes a disturbing encounter with Madonna who, he says, “looked at him with an expression he will never forget – a snarl of contempt, cold fury”. The rest can be read in The House of the Unsaidavailable in French from First editions.
The House of the Unsaid, by RuPaul, translated from English (United States) by Emmanuelle Urien (ed. First), available.
“From here to the great unknown : mémoires”, de Lisa Marie Presley et Riley Keough
If Priscilla Presley returned to the fore thanks to Sofia Coppola's biopic, Lisa Marie, the only child of her union with Elvis, remains a figure as familiar as she is enigmatic. Heiress at the age of 25 to the entire estate of the King – estimated at 100 million dollars -, her existence was chaotic: after a few musical attempts and four unhappy marriages (including the supernatural one with Michael Jackson), Lisa Marie died of a heart attack at age 54 while working on this text. She was a Scientologist, but the sect failed to curb her demons: addictions, depression, her life resembles a slow drift in an ocean of melancholy. “The sadness started at age 9 when my father died, and it never went away,” she writes. The suicide of her son, Ben, in 2020, will throw her into hell. His daughter, the actress Riley Keough, took over the manuscript to complete these moving stories with infinite tact. Memoirs and thus pay tribute to the one who “had a broken heart all her life”.
From here to the great unknown : mémoires, by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough, translated from English (United States) by Dominique Margon (ed. JC Lattès), available.
-“Cher: The Memoir, Part One,” by Cher
“My life seems to be longer than that of any other human being,” Cher declared last year when announcing the publication of her memoir. “I feel like I should be in the Guinness Book of Records !” But where does this phenomenon come from? It was in the heart of the sixties that the duo Sonny & Cher exploded thanks to the hit I Got You Babe. For ten years, the couple embodied the soft version of the hippie movement before Cher took off to become a “bigger than life” star in the charts and on the big screen (The Silkwood Mystery, The Witches of Eastwick, Moonlight…).
From folk to rock, from disco to metal, the singer has never been afraid to take risks (she is the first to use the vocoder on her hit Believe) while revealing an impressive anatomy in the craziest outfits. Icon, muse, activist, symbol, The incredible Cher needed two volumes to recount her seventy-eight years spent on earth.
Cher : The Memoir, Part 1, by Cher (Harper Collins), available.
Article published in the Harper's Bazaar magazine for December 2024 and January 2025.
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