Loved Oprah’s 108th Book Club Pick? Here’s What You Should Read Next (2024)

Who among us has not, at one point, wished that they were the progeny of an A-lister? It’s hard not to feel a twinge of envy when we saw Suri Cruise (now Suri Noelle) decked out in custom Louboutins at the tender age of nineteen months, or singer Tyrese buying his eight-year-old a private island for Christmas. But if Oprah’s 108th Book Club pick taught us anything (and it taught us a lot) it’s that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the Hollywood sign after all. Although Lisa Marie explains in the memoir that she never doubted her father’s love for her, being Elvis’ only child came at a high cost. Like so many celeb kids, she grew up under-parented and over-exposed, constantly dodging the paparazzi and distrustful of those around her. But with those hard experiences came hard-won lessons—and some truly outrageous stories. If you devoured From Here to the Great Unknown and are still hungry for more, these other memoirs by children of celebrities capture the highs and lows of growing up with a silver spoon (and a publicist).

Life in the shadow of a parent’s limelight is never easy, but it’s also never boring. Read on for books that make us see our celebrity heroes—and their gilded lives—from a totally new perspective.

In 1985, Steve Jobs was one of the richest people in America, living in a sprawling 30-room mansion and frequently appearing beneath headlines and on magazine covers. Meanwhile, his only child was moving—thirteen times in the first seven years of her life— between illegal sublets and inconsistently furnished spare bedrooms, surviving off of her single mother’s ingenuity and her father’s meager court-mandated child support checks. Although Jobs denied his paternity for many years, telling Time magazine when Lisa was four that “Twenty-eight percent of the male population of the United States could be the father” (against the findings of a DNA test and a legal case), he eventually the two grew closer later in her childhood, with Lisa living with her father on-and-off and eventually taking his surname. But for Steve Jobs, love, like success, could only be chased, never caught. While the circumstances of Lisa’s childhood would have easily justified a scathing tell-all takedown, this book is not that. Infinitely wise, intensely curious, and exquisitely written, Small Fry is a nuanced portrait or both a man and an era, the legacies of which we are all still reckoning with.

Christina Crawford’s damning account of her adoptive mother, Joan Crawford’s, sadistic parenting has earned its place as the most famously controversial celebrity exposé, but if all you know of the story boils down to Faye Dunaway screeching about “wire hangers” in the 1981 film adaptation, it’s high time you pick up a copy of the source material. Igniting a media storm upon its publication (and a defamation suit more than a decade after), the memoir alleges that the Academy-award-winning classic Hollywood “It Girl” was a violent alcoholic who constantly berated, fiercely competed with, and eventually disinherited two of her four children. While Joan Crawford’s other children, as well as many of her friends, costars, and even rivals like Bette Davis, dispute the book's claims, it remains a vital cultural touchstone that helped us see that, beneath all the glitz and glamour, celebrities really are just like us—and often even messier.

When “Mama Cass” Elliot, the superstar contralto at the core of the Mamas and the Papas rock band, had a fatal heart attack at the age of thirty-two, she left behind a skyrocketing solo career, a whirlwind of cruel rumors that the self-proclaimed “most famous fat girl to ever live” had died choking on a ham sandwich, and a seven-year-old daughter. Fifty years later, that daughter, now a mother herself, dives into archives and old address books to tell her mother’s story with the dignity it always deserved—and to understand the mother she barely had the chance to know. Owen recounts how a great aunt dissuaded her from writing the book, snapping, “What the hell do you know about her? You were too young,” to which the author cooly responded, “Exactly…that’s the point.” Owen’s distance from her mother allows her to see her life clearly in all its highs and lows: her astounding talent, her wrenching loneliness, and her battles with addiction and with the public’s constant lampooning of her body. But the author’s love for her mother burns beneath every sentence, illuminating the story from within. An overdue tribute to an underappreciated icon.

Today, Mia Farrow’s star is so bright that it’s easy to forget the cosmos she came from. As the daughter of the silver screen icon and Tarzan actress Maureen O’Sullivan and Oscar-winning writer-director John Farrow, Mia Farrow and her siblings grew up dousing themselves in fake blood to prank passing celebrity tour busses and minding their manners with their parents’ superstar dinner guests. “Of children of show business, we came easily to the business of shows,” Farrow writes, but this is not to say that the business was an easy one. Perhaps more consistently and explosively than any other celebrity in recent memory, Mia Farrow has been entangled in public scandal: from her father’s high-profile extramarital affairs with the likes of Ava Gardner, to her own first marriage to a fifty-year-old Frank Sinatra at the age of twenty-one, to her complicated (to put it beyond mildly) divorce from the director Woody Allen. In the memoir, Farrow addresses each of these scandals and more, with an intense candor and self-reflection, letting no one—least of all herself— off the hook. From the first line ("I was nine when my childhood ended") to the last, you will be glued to the page.