Lockdown tell-alls and exorcisms: why 2021 is the year of the celebrity memoir

Lockdown after lockdown gave bored celebs the idea to write their life stories – with varying degrees of success. Here are the best – and worst – in the book shops.

Miriam Margolyes

During the pandemic, many novelists reported experiencing what came to be known as writer’s blockdown. Stuck in the eternal present of loading and unloading the dishwasher, the creative area of the brain was overridden by its ceaseless processing part, leaving many writers unable to write a shopping list.

Apart from the nine-year-old girl in Yorkshire, who got a book deal for her first novel, tumbleweed blew though the imaginations of novelists everywhere else, as banana bread settled around their middles.