Hey, Pippa, your $50 book looks like the dullest volume to emerge from Camp Windsor since Prince Charles mistakenly guessed we wanted to hear his thoughts on architecture. Here’s a little free advice on how to spice it up a bit the next time you take pen to paper.
1. Rethink that cover photo. This time the book displays your face. Unless you’re going for a “side of me nobody recognizes” feel: Wrong end, Pippa, wrong end. “One day I might be able to make sense of this,” you write of your global fame in “Celebrate.” “In the meantime, I think it’s fair to say that it has its upside and its downside.” Er, don’t you mean “backside”?
2. Work those family ties a little. The author blurb in “Celebrate” defines you as “the editor of The Party Times, an online party magazine from Party Pieces, the UK’s leading online party-supply company, founded in 1987.” Well, sign us up for a lifetime subscription to that one! While no one’s doubting it was your raw editorial talent that earned you a gig running the newsletter for your parents’ kitschy party business, the family you were born into is not the most interesting one you are connected to. How about next time you go with: “Pippa Middleton is an international party babe, cocktail-hour mainstay, yacht ornament and sister of the Duchess of Cambridge who has seen Princes William and Harry in their knickers”? Also, we’d really like to hear some in-law gossip, like “I hear Diana was a whingey little psycho.”
3. It’s 2012. The English stiff-upper-lip thing is so over. You say in the book, “I’m a typical girl in her twenties trying to forge a career and represent herself in what can sometimes seem rather strange circumstances.” Er, you’re not typical, Pippa. You’re a shining star of the Brit Pack. How about something a little more forthright and honest? Like, “I was born rich and pretty, and now I’m even richer and prettier, and also famous. Here are some tips on how to be a world-class party animal like me.”
4. Cover words matter. “Celebrate” is an excellent title if you’re Kool & the Gang and this is 1980. Try to come across as slightly more up to date than that ossified couple of geezers who hand out the Wimbledon trophy every year.
5. Give us fitness tips. Is it all the shimmying in your bra? Is it the gluteal sculpting that comes naturally with wearing a toilet-paper minidress? Or do you spend the hour a day that isn’t taken up with partying on a killer treadmill routine? Don’t wait till you’re 80 to tell us, Pippa: What is the secret to crafting the world’s perkiest posterior?