Book #42: Kylie la la la by William Baker & Kylie Minogue
Number of pages: 212
Kylie's official biography was published in 2003, and I impulse bought it when it first came out; for whatever reason, I've only just opened it to read the text, rather than look at the pictures.
William Baker, who wrote most of this, is Kylie's creative director, and many of the stories he tells in this show that he knows her very well; he seems to identify with her a lot, describing the book at one point as "merely a tale - a fairy tale of two Cinderellas." I preferred the sections that Kylie wrote herself, which felt like too few, and like they had been snipped up and spread throughout the book. Baker's writing occasionally felt like a list of things Kylie did in her life, and focused mainly on her singing career, briefly touching on her acting role in Neighbours which very little on her before she was famous.
I think the main issue was that, while the book talked a lot about Kylie's songs and, not surprisingly, her status as an LGBTQ+ icon, it felt like there was far too much about fashion and clothes that were chosen for her videos, which didn't interest me particularly. I perhaps shouldn't have been too surprised, because when Kylie met William Baker, he was working in Vivienne Westwood's shop.
A cursory google search shows that Kylie hasn't yet self-written an autobiography yet (as I imagine she would do) but if this did come out, maybe I'd give that a try too. Unfortunately, I intend on keeping this particular book, only for the pictures.
Next book: Sirens (Joseph Knox)