March 11, 2014

Lindsay Lohan reportedly gets less than she deserves for Great American Memoir

by

Lindsay Lohan

Lindsay Lohan (via s_bukley / Shutterstock.com)

Lindsay Lohan, aka “LiLo,” aka “the 21st century’s Zelda Fitzgerald,” is about to sell a memoir to HarperCollins for about $1 million, according to unconfirmed reports. There’s no word as to exactly what the book will cover, though most outlets have assumed its subject will be the actress’s rise and fall: her life as a child star, her ascent to superstardom in the film Mean Girls, and her post-Herbie decline. But as of now, we know very little about it, except that it may involve a diary she kept during a stint in rehab in 2013. But who knows, maybe it will turn out to be a rambling, folksy, Chroniclesesque memoir! (I would probably be more interested in say, her love for deceased Grateful Dead keyboardist Brent Myland or a correspondence course on stenography she took in 2006, than I would about her trials and tribulations, but I am probably not this book’s target audience.) Yahoo describes the book, about which we know next to nothing, as a “tome,” which is hilarious.

What we do know is that, should the deal go down, Lohan is getting paid, which is a very good thing as she has reportedly squandered her fortune. That said, the $1 million she is reportedly receiving is reportedly less than she wanted—her agent’s asking price appears to have been between $2.9-$5 million. Still, $1 million is nothing to sneeze at; hopefully it’ll prevent LiLo from starring in anything resembling The Canyons for at least a year or two. Lohan ,who is consistently and lazily described as “troubled,” appears to have become more reliable over the last year or so, but publishing houses were reportedly nervous. Over the weekend an anonymous source told the New York Post‘s Page Six that, “It’s more or less an autobiography, but she had a minimal number of sample pages. There was initial interest, but everybody backed off. There was concern she wouldn’t deliver.” HarperCollins refused to comment, while Lohan’s publicist said “there have been some conversations, but nothing official yet.”

Lohan, who is the daughter of reality star Dina Lohan, is currently starring in Lindsay, a reality TV Show, which debuted on Sunday on Oprah‘s OWN Network. CNN described the show as “a docu-series that came across in its first episode as part E! True Hollywood Story and part Intervention, with a dash of Hoarders. (Lohan, apparently, gets rid of nothing.)” Lohan had this to say about the reality show: “I did it because it’s not a reality show, it’s pretty raw. Obviously it’s TV, so things will be edited in certain ways to get ratings, which I can’t control, but I do know that my intentions going into it were really pure and really honest.” One expects her memoir to be similar. And I, for one, hope the deal goes down—regardless of how the book turns out (and I legitimately think it will be great), it’s nice to have Lindsay back.

 

Alex Shephard is the director of digital media for Melville House, and a former bookseller.

MobyLives