Some of the best social commentary around: Celebrity Book Club with Steven & Lily reviewed

When I was ten years old I had a babysitter who was a beautiful graduate student at an Ivy League university who loved to read celebrity gossip tabloids to ‘turn her brain off’. After I’d finished my homework, she and I would watch the only reality TV show I’ve ever loved, The Hills, and read magazines about Brangelina. This all ended when I was with my mom at the grocery store and I tried to buy a tabloid, and my mother, a Woman of Taste, asked what on earth I was doing. I said, copying my babysitter, ‘it’s to turn my brain off’, and my mom flipped out and made me to go to my room and read something like Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm.

What my mother didn’t understand is that we live in an era in which smart people are able to consume stupid media and extrapolate brilliant insights about the world from what they see. I mean, like, hasn’t she ever heard of Adorno? There would be no one better equipped to teach her this lesson than comedians Steven Phillips-Horst and Lily Marotta, hosts of the podcast Celebrity Book Club, who have turned the exegesis of celebrity memoirs into some of the best social commentary and entertainment around.

In each episode of Celebrity Book Club, Marotta and Phillips-Horst discuss a celebrity memoir that they have read. They cast a wide net when it comes to book selection – they’ve covered the memoirs of entertainers like Sinead O’Connor and Demi Moore, the cookbook of The Hills star Kristin Cavallari, Elizabeth Warren’s children’s book, and also the Bible, which they called the memoir of ‘the world’s biggest celebrity, God’. A forthcoming episode will discuss the memoir of Austrian impresario Sir Rudolf Bing, the former general manager of the Metropolitan Opera.