Despite their proliferation, celebrity memoirs often seem incapable of justifying their own existence: a string of carefully curated anecdotes woven together to approximate a life already lived in the glare of the media. Perhaps because actors are on the one hand concealed by the roles they play, and on the other exposed to the prying eyes of the public, their autobiographies tend to inhabit a paradoxical netherworld of disclosure and obfuscation, cautious oscillations on a back off/come hither axis. Both Sam Neill’s and Heather Mitchell’s recent memoirs traverse this uneasy ground, feeding us sometimes incredibly intimate details while remaining stubbornly mute on the larger questions of their careers.
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