Being Jordan: My Autobiography
by Katie Price
Blake £16.99, pp286
Going laptopless into the jungle, Jordan has emerged with an autobiography of hallucinatory and compelling awfulness. Although a 'book' by only the least stringent definition, the presumption must be that the intervention of a professional 'writer' enhanced the literary Jordan (pp ix + 277) as much as the surgeon's hands and silicon have enhanced the mammary Jordan (32DD).
Certainly, a sort of genius has been at work. While no Victoria Beckham in terms of prose style, the voice captured here has a shrill and crass authenticity commanding attention. Dedicatees include 'my mum', 'my nan' and 'my late grandad', but in truth this book is directed at contemporary Britain. Bluewater has found its bard.
Sparing no effort to research the background for this review, I tapped 'Jordan's tits' into Google and, like a shopper in Harrods, entered a different world. There can be no debate that Jordan has an impressive pair of hooters, but in her possession is something less substantial, but even more engrossing. In both form and function, this page-three 'model' is an expression of popular desire, evidence of our civilisation's preoccupations as complete as Versailles or Sanssouci were of theirs.
The Official Jordan Fan Club will sell you an ironing board cover bearing an image whose bikini disappears 'as she gets hot'. A subculture of smut and idols has become The Culture. All this, to use an appropriately strangulated form of words, has been achieved on the back of breasts.
Less appreciative elements of the press have called Jordan a slapper and a tart. In response, there are touching attempts to establish a pedigree of gentility. Jordan is the nom de guerre of Katie Price, a 25-year-old from Brighton. There is a photograph of Uncle Henry who is said to have designed Brighton Marina, although I thought it was the Louis de Soissons architectural practice. Anyway, Uncle Henry has a villa in Marbella. In the Jordan Weltanschauung this makes Uncle Henry positively armigerous. And it is a useful element in the status battle with Posh Spice, a recurrent motif.
In one finely etched episode, Mrs Beckham and Jordan go to the ladies' retiring room where the conversation immediately turns to boobs: 'I showed her mine; she showed me hers.' If only a Trollope had been been witness to this trollop's display of her attributes.
Yet Jordan says, 'I am tired of being the girl who simply gets her tits out,' and it is true that she has other interests. We are told that Dwight Yorke, a footballer, has 'quite a big willy'. Gareth Gates, a pubescent pop star of small experience and even less talent, rips his foreskin on the job (Jordan administers Vaseline) and: 'The only thing I didn't like about Gary's body was the wart he had on his balls.'
The tackiness is so intense I could not put the book down. It provides a sort of spiritual instruction for anyone still victim to the delusion that beauty and intellect are bourgeois constructs which blur in the thrilling competition of relativism, Being Jordan is a stern rebuke. It is utter, total tosh.
The nuclear physicist Wolfgang Pauli used to say of imperfect theorems advanced him by incautious students, 'It's not even wrong!' suggesting that being wrong was, at least, in the same conceptual area as being right. Jordan's book is not even bad. It is, however, a history of contemporary Britain. Dazed, I put it down and thought: 'I'm an aesthete, get me out of here.'
