Books like Kerry Katona Too Much, Too Young

Ghostwritten by Fanny Blake, this is very much a book of two parts.The first is a full-on, straight up memoir of abuse and neglect. From harsh upbringing through government care and fostering to violent surroundings and questionable role models and behaviour, this is pretty much dark and gritty misery at its finest. If nothing else, this book should hold the record for ‘Most stabbings/serious threat of being stabbed in the space of a few chapters’, but more than anything else, it is really quite remarkable how many of the surrounding characters are prone to just knifing each other. Fortunately for ‘our’ Kerry though, she comes out of it quite unscathed, despite attibuting just that towards her depression many years later.In the case of what has happened this week, Kerry faced nothing new in terms of stressful situations, despite reportedly admitting herself to The Priory. Her life has been one big, hour long death ridden episode of Eastenders. Granted, there probably hasn’t been very many times when she has had a knife held to her throat but from reading the (often difficult) first half of her book, you get a sense that she has been around that level of pain in her life. Shunted from foster parents to emergency women’s shelter and constantly in fear of her mother’s violent partner, Kerry’s life has been one of raised voices and having to grow up early.Whether it’s nursing a mother with slashed wrists and being introduced at an early age to her lesbian partner or being introduced to yet another parental unit and coping with major lifes changes so often you can’t help but sympathise, you really have to admire her resolve and strength and it has made me wonder over the time reading this, if that is exactly her appeal to the world. Because before, I really couldn’t work it out. The level of interest in her. I mean, if you put Kerry Katona on the big celebrity wheel of life and exposed her for having left a crappy girl band and married someone in another a good few years ago now, really fame and the celebrity world should have swallowed her whole.But that is why Kerry is a fascinating media subject. The level of her continued media prescence since the turn of the millenium and the end of her proposed music career is something to be admired. Such is that level of celebrity recognition and regularity in the tabloid magazine, she has (aswell as Jade and Jordan and Jodie) acheived that status of female celebrity, being known solely by her first name.For those of you in a Grazia and OK!-free bubble. Kerry was a member of girl band, Atomic Kitten until she was replaced/left after frustrating the other two members of Atomic Kitten with all the attention she got. This was apparently due to Kerry being the only one with breasts if her book is to believed. And there is a lot about Kerry’s lovely natural breasts. Despite the acrimony that you sense from the pages about this, Kerry has good things to say about her band members:“We didn’t pretend to be anything more than we were- three girls having a good time. Always being up for a laugh, in your face and down to earth was what made us different from other girl bands around.”Different, yes. You could even say you had... girl power?Suffice to say and unfortunate for Kerry’s theory, Atomic Kitten were so like The Spice Girls (even briefly filling the gap when they broke up), Kerry tells us similar tales of them going around record company offices and jumping on tables and being wild, a trick The Spice Girls coined themselves. In fact, the only difference between Atomic Kitten and The Spice Girls is that there wasn’t five kittens, there were only three. A formula that had been already exhausted in the music world also with the likes of Eternal, Destiny’s Child, All Saints and TLC all having major successes as 3-pieces and moving on and as naff and formulaic as you may think they were a minor and fairly insignificant blip on pop.But Kerry, forever the loyalist to the cause of the kittens in this book, falls short on describing herself as a credible artist and singer when she describes the scene around recording their first single in the studio and the fuss around the lyrics that they produced were not satisfactory enough so they just “ran them through a computer”:“It’s amazing what they could do.”The difference in your vocals were amazing, you mean?Kerry eventually left under a cloud of headlines and fell on her career sword for him and left Atomic Kitten as they were both getting heat from subsequent managers and agents and taking up a rather obvious relationship with a member of Westlife and eventually Brian’s homemaker. Unfortunately, not long after their wedding, it came to light that Brian had gotten a blowjob from a lapdancer on his stag night and had paid her £15,000 to keep quiet. She didn’t and Brian eventually found himself leaving the band to go solo not long after. He found himslef in much trouble and almost cuckolded at one point for the sake of his marriage.After this incident, the book goes at breakneck speed towards present day as if she hasn’t done anything of note since, which is a shame because upto that point, it’s actually a great book. Granted, her biggest contribution for TV is as a spokesperson for a discount frozen foods retailer but in terms of tabloid inches she is still worth publishing gold, despite her lack of recent successes which is why Ebury have staked their flag into the still-barren wasteland that is the ghostwritten fiction market.Kerry brings up (quite honestly) the main undesirable edge of that sword that is fame, probably not the best soceity to be around with bi-polar disorder in the first place:“Fame finds any cracks in your life and makes them bigger, takes hundreds of photos of them and plasters them all over the front pages for six million people to see. Your life stops being your own anymore.”So true and she has more than a right to have this opinion as her life has been through the ringer in the red tops with an unprecedented and bizarre amount of interest. Everything from new hair to new man to break up to make up is all there for us to see every week in the glossy magazines with unnerving regularity and when you think life has calmed down for Kerry and she is settled with the new man and the new baby and the perfect life, the cycle of celebrity headlines come round once again full circle until the next haircut, new man, new life.But the fame angle Kerry has is an opinion that runs throughout this book and we find that celebrities are addicted in many ways to that drug, very much a drug of choice, mind you but still a drug, nevertheless.But as the pre-publicity heats up for Kerry’s newest venture, pulling the wool over her fan’s (10 million of them apparently) eyes, Kerry has headed back to The Priory, a place she is not unfamiliar with throughout the book, especially post-lapdance blowjob, but this time it has been due to a very emotional and harrowing experience. That of her and her partner being taken by knifepoint and having their home ransacked of over £100,000 worth of possessions including a blue BMW.The police initially were baffled at how this group of individuals had acheived such a feat of piracy and general fleecing. It turns out the doors were unlocked.