What essay writers can learn from Paris Hilton

Paris: The Memoir offers advice for business owners and creatives culled from her husband's book Shortcut Your Startup

I picked up Paris Hilton’s fittingly titled March 2023 book Paris: The Memoir, assuming it would be typical celebrity memoir fare—a little gossip, a little nostalgia, a lot of self-serving spin, with a dash of outrageousness thrown in. What I’ve gotten so far (I’m roughly three quarters of the way through, about to start Chapter 15) is a riveting, disturbing, and fascinating look at all sorts of topics that I never read about when tabloids were splashing the reality TV show star and hotel empire heiress’s blondeness across their front pages.

The book is a fascinating read that I urge you to check out, especially if you have ADHD, a mental health condition that plays a starring role in the book from page one, literally. That, plus her experiences as a rape survivor and having been kidnapped at the behest of her parents and taken to a series of “troubled teen” facilities, only escaping by her wits and street smart skills learned from clubbing, is quite a tale. (For more on the book, check out this episode of the excellent podcast Celebrity Memoir Book Club; I’ll be listening as soon as I turn the last page).

Paris Hilton’s Paris: The Memoir

What I want to tell you about here that’s relevant if you write memoir and/or essays is this part of Paris: The Memoir which quotes the book Shortcut Your Startup: Speed Up Success with Unconventional Advice from the Trenches by Courtney Reum and Carter Reum, Paris’s husband. Yes, by the titlte of the book, which I haven’t read, it’s clear that the title is geared toward startups and businesspeople but I think this advice can work perfectly for writers mining their own lives for memoir and essay ideas, and that can also apply to freelance writers pitching journalistic articles. Paris writes that Courtney and Carter Reum serve up “three key questions before you start anything.”