Limelight: Canadian Women and the Rise of Celebrity Autobiography

At the heart of fame is the tricky business of image management and over the last 115 years the celebrity autobiography has emerged as a popular and useful tool for that project. Using the memoirs of famous Canadian women like L.M. Montgomery, Nellie McClung, the Dionne Quintuplets, Margaret Trudeau, and Shania Twain, Limelight traces the rise of celebrity autobiography in Canada and the role gender continues to play in becoming famous and writing about that experience.
Arguing that the celebrity autobiography is always negotiating historically specific conditions, Katja Lee charts a history of celebrity in English Canada and the conditions that shape how women access and experience fame. These contexts shed light on the stories women tell about their lives and the kinds of public images they cultivate in their autobiographies. As strategies of self-representation change and the pressure to represent the private life escalates, the celebrity autobiography undergoes three distinct shifts in form, function, and content.
Limelight is the first book to chart the history and development of the celebrity autobiography and offers compelling evidence of the critical role of gender and nation in how fame is experienced and represented.