Authorizing Fictions: Narrating a Self in Mistinguett's Celebrity Memoir.

This article examines how one of the most popular French celebrities of the twentieth century, Mistinguett (née Jeanne Florentine Bourgeois), used the medium of memoir to narrate a self and to produce her posterity. Located at the intersection of commerce and culture, celebrity memoir provides public figures a commodified textual stage for enacting, performing, and disseminating their brand. But to dismiss celebrity memoir as mere publicity, as simply another form of self-promotion and brand management, undermines its broader cultural value. As Mistinguett's memoir, Toute ma vie (1954), demonstrates, celebrity memoirs offer much more than a stylized recounting and commercial packaging of a life; they illuminate the production of celebrity itself. Ultimately, by exploring how Mistinguett negotiated the competing personas through which she produced her performative self, this article argues that celebrity memoir divulges the complex and concerted ego performances through which modern celebrity is fashioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]