Ever wondered what frivolous whims you’d indulge if you were made queen for the day? Liz Hurley has. The actor recently told the Guardian she’d ban car air fresheners. She should have stopped there (it’s a winning policy platform) but she added that she’d also ban prison sentences for white-collar criminals and make them do things like teach inner-city kids to ride horses instead.
If I were queen for the day I’d focus less on white-collar criminals and more on literary ones: implementing an immediate ban on celebrities writing children’s books. Should a famous person so much as think of penning a kids’ book, it’d be straight to jail: locked in a cell full of the strongest-smelling air fresheners available.
The celebrity children’s book trend is out of control: everyone from Keith Richards to Meghan Markle to Keira Knightley has written one. Which has naturally frustrated non-famous authors who rely on their talent, rather than their name to sell books, particularly as trying to eke out a living as a writer is increasingly difficult.
To be fair, simply being famous doesn’t necessarily mean your kids’ book is going to be a success. As Markle discovered, it could still flop. And, as celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is currently discovering, you could also find yourself embroiled in an international PR disaster.
Oliver published his first children’s book, Billy and the Giant Adventure, last year. That didn’t cause any major international incidents but the sequel, a 400-page fantasy novel, has caused uproar. The issue is a section of the book in which a young First Nations girl living in foster care in an Indigenous community is kidnapped: advocacy groups have called it “damaging” and “disrespectful”, and said it trivialises the trauma associated with Australia’s violent history of child removal. The book has now been pulled from shelves. Oliver and his publishers wholeheartedly apologised for their misjudgment.
I don’t think certain topics are automatically off limits for certain writers. But, crikey, if you’re going to tackle fraught subjects, you’ve got to be able to pull it off. Let this be a lesson to celebrities: if you really must bash out a kids’ book, stick to subjects closer to home. Dinosaurs learning to make pasta, perhaps. Or white-collar criminals teaching inner-city kids to ride horses.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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