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Kerry Katona - Too Much, Too Young
The first series of "I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here" was dominated by two women, Kerry, the eventual winner, and Jordan, whose first autobiography sold a staggering 500,000 copies through the trade. Until now Kerry has never told her full story. She may have permanently graced the front of OK, had her every move followed and reported by the tabloids, watched her marriage disintegrate under the camera's glare, learnt of her husband's infidelity via the papers, and gone into rehab in America trailed by the journos. But she has never actually told her own story in full. Her first memory was of watching her mother try to kill herself, her childhood was one of shifting foster homes and children's homes, but now as a single mother she is trying to put tragedy behind her and raise her two children in a loving and secure home. This is a story of a little girl who fought to escape her background, became famous at an incredibly young age, married a heartthrob too young and sank to the very lowest point after he left her, but is now building a triumphant, independent life of her own. It's a book with an incredibly moving, inspirational message. This book is a heart-wrenching, gripping read with an totally uplifting end.
Hardcover
First published October 5, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
August 1, 2013
Ghostwritten by Fanny Blake, this is very much a book of two parts.
The first is a full-on, straight up memoir of abuse and neglect. From harsh upbringing through government care and fostering to violent surroundings and questionable role models and behaviour, this is pretty much dark and gritty misery at its finest. If nothing else, this book should hold the record for ‘Most stabbings/serious threat of being stabbed in the space of a few chapters’, but more than anything else, it is really quite remarkable how many of the surrounding characters are prone to just knifing each other. Fortunately for ‘our’ Kerry though, she comes out of it quite unscathed, despite attibuting just that towards her depression many years later.
In the case of what has happened this week, Kerry faced nothing new in terms of stressful situations, despite reportedly admitting herself to The Priory. Her life has been one big, hour long death ridden episode of Eastenders. Granted, there probably hasn’t been very many times when she has had a knife held to her throat but from reading the (often difficult) first half of her book, you get a sense that she has been around that level of pain in her life. Shunted from foster parents to emergency women’s shelter and constantly in fear of her mother’s violent partner, Kerry’s life has been one of raised voices and having to grow up early.
Whether it’s nursing a mother with slashed wrists and being introduced at an early age to her lesbian partner or being introduced to yet another parental unit and coping with major lifes changes so often you can’t help but sympathise, you really have to admire her resolve and strength and it has made me wonder over the time reading this, if that is exactly her appeal to the world. Because before, I really couldn’t work it out. The level of interest in her. I mean, if you put Kerry Katona on the big celebrity wheel of life and exposed her for having left a crappy girl band and married someone in another a good few years ago now, really fame and the celebrity world should have swallowed her whole.
But that is why Kerry is a fascinating media subject. The level of her continued media prescence since the turn of the millenium and the end of her proposed music career is something to be admired. Such is that level of celebrity recognition and regularity in the tabloid magazine, she has (aswell as Jade and Jordan and Jodie) acheived that status of female celebrity, being known solely by her first name.
For those of you in a Grazia and OK!-free bubble. Kerry was a member of girl band, Atomic Kitten until she was replaced/left after frustrating the other two members of Atomic Kitten with all the attention she got. This was apparently due to Kerry being the only one with breasts if her book is to believed. And there is a lot about Kerry’s lovely natural breasts. Despite the acrimony that you sense from the pages about this, Kerry has good things to say about her band members:
“We didn’t pretend to be anything more than we were- three girls having a good time. Always being up for a laugh, in your face and down to earth was what made us different from other girl bands around.”
Different, yes. You could even say you had... girl power?
Suffice to say and unfortunate for Kerry’s theory, Atomic Kitten were so like The Spice Girls (even briefly filling the gap when they broke up), Kerry tells us similar tales of them going around record company offices and jumping on tables and being wild, a trick The Spice Girls coined themselves. In fact, the only difference between Atomic Kitten and The Spice Girls is that there wasn’t five kittens, there were only three. A formula that had been already exhausted in the music world also with the likes of Eternal, Destiny’s Child, All Saints and TLC all having major successes as 3-pieces and moving on and as naff and formulaic as you may think they were a minor and fairly insignificant blip on pop.
But Kerry, forever the loyalist to the cause of the kittens in this book, falls short on describing herself as a credible artist and singer when she describes the scene around recording their first single in the studio and the fuss around the lyrics that they produced were not satisfactory enough so they just “ran them through a computer”:
“It’s amazing what they could do.”
The difference in your vocals were amazing, you mean?
Kerry eventually left under a cloud of headlines and fell on her career sword for him and left Atomic Kitten as they were both getting heat from subsequent managers and agents and taking up a rather obvious relationship with a member of Westlife and eventually Brian’s homemaker. Unfortunately, not long after their wedding, it came to light that Brian had gotten a blowjob from a lapdancer on his stag night and had paid her £15,000 to keep quiet. She didn’t and Brian eventually found himself leaving the band to go solo not long after. He found himslef in much trouble and almost cuckolded at one point for the sake of his marriage.
After this incident, the book goes at breakneck speed towards present day as if she hasn’t done anything of note since, which is a shame because upto that point, it’s actually a great book. Granted, her biggest contribution for TV is as a spokesperson for a discount frozen foods retailer but in terms of tabloid inches she is still worth publishing gold, despite her lack of recent successes which is why Ebury have staked their flag into the still-barren wasteland that is the ghostwritten fiction market.
Kerry brings up (quite honestly) the main undesirable edge of that sword that is fame, probably not the best soceity to be around with bi-polar disorder in the first place:
“Fame finds any cracks in your life and makes them bigger, takes hundreds of photos of them and plasters them all over the front pages for six million people to see. Your life stops being your own anymore.”
So true and she has more than a right to have this opinion as her life has been through the ringer in the red tops with an unprecedented and bizarre amount of interest. Everything from new hair to new man to break up to make up is all there for us to see every week in the glossy magazines with unnerving regularity and when you think life has calmed down for Kerry and she is settled with the new man and the new baby and the perfect life, the cycle of celebrity headlines come round once again full circle until the next haircut, new man, new life.
But the fame angle Kerry has is an opinion that runs throughout this book and we find that celebrities are addicted in many ways to that drug, very much a drug of choice, mind you but still a drug, nevertheless.
But as the pre-publicity heats up for Kerry’s newest venture, pulling the wool over her fan’s (10 million of them apparently) eyes, Kerry has headed back to The Priory, a place she is not unfamiliar with throughout the book, especially post-lapdance blowjob, but this time it has been due to a very emotional and harrowing experience. That of her and her partner being taken by knifepoint and having their home ransacked of over £100,000 worth of possessions including a blue BMW.
The police initially were baffled at how this group of individuals had acheived such a feat of piracy and general fleecing. It turns out the doors were unlocked.
The first is a full-on, straight up memoir of abuse and neglect. From harsh upbringing through government care and fostering to violent surroundings and questionable role models and behaviour, this is pretty much dark and gritty misery at its finest. If nothing else, this book should hold the record for ‘Most stabbings/serious threat of being stabbed in the space of a few chapters’, but more than anything else, it is really quite remarkable how many of the surrounding characters are prone to just knifing each other. Fortunately for ‘our’ Kerry though, she comes out of it quite unscathed, despite attibuting just that towards her depression many years later.
In the case of what has happened this week, Kerry faced nothing new in terms of stressful situations, despite reportedly admitting herself to The Priory. Her life has been one big, hour long death ridden episode of Eastenders. Granted, there probably hasn’t been very many times when she has had a knife held to her throat but from reading the (often difficult) first half of her book, you get a sense that she has been around that level of pain in her life. Shunted from foster parents to emergency women’s shelter and constantly in fear of her mother’s violent partner, Kerry’s life has been one of raised voices and having to grow up early.
Whether it’s nursing a mother with slashed wrists and being introduced at an early age to her lesbian partner or being introduced to yet another parental unit and coping with major lifes changes so often you can’t help but sympathise, you really have to admire her resolve and strength and it has made me wonder over the time reading this, if that is exactly her appeal to the world. Because before, I really couldn’t work it out. The level of interest in her. I mean, if you put Kerry Katona on the big celebrity wheel of life and exposed her for having left a crappy girl band and married someone in another a good few years ago now, really fame and the celebrity world should have swallowed her whole.
But that is why Kerry is a fascinating media subject. The level of her continued media prescence since the turn of the millenium and the end of her proposed music career is something to be admired. Such is that level of celebrity recognition and regularity in the tabloid magazine, she has (aswell as Jade and Jordan and Jodie) acheived that status of female celebrity, being known solely by her first name.
For those of you in a Grazia and OK!-free bubble. Kerry was a member of girl band, Atomic Kitten until she was replaced/left after frustrating the other two members of Atomic Kitten with all the attention she got. This was apparently due to Kerry being the only one with breasts if her book is to believed. And there is a lot about Kerry’s lovely natural breasts. Despite the acrimony that you sense from the pages about this, Kerry has good things to say about her band members:
“We didn’t pretend to be anything more than we were- three girls having a good time. Always being up for a laugh, in your face and down to earth was what made us different from other girl bands around.”
Different, yes. You could even say you had... girl power?
Suffice to say and unfortunate for Kerry’s theory, Atomic Kitten were so like The Spice Girls (even briefly filling the gap when they broke up), Kerry tells us similar tales of them going around record company offices and jumping on tables and being wild, a trick The Spice Girls coined themselves. In fact, the only difference between Atomic Kitten and The Spice Girls is that there wasn’t five kittens, there were only three. A formula that had been already exhausted in the music world also with the likes of Eternal, Destiny’s Child, All Saints and TLC all having major successes as 3-pieces and moving on and as naff and formulaic as you may think they were a minor and fairly insignificant blip on pop.
But Kerry, forever the loyalist to the cause of the kittens in this book, falls short on describing herself as a credible artist and singer when she describes the scene around recording their first single in the studio and the fuss around the lyrics that they produced were not satisfactory enough so they just “ran them through a computer”:
“It’s amazing what they could do.”
The difference in your vocals were amazing, you mean?
Kerry eventually left under a cloud of headlines and fell on her career sword for him and left Atomic Kitten as they were both getting heat from subsequent managers and agents and taking up a rather obvious relationship with a member of Westlife and eventually Brian’s homemaker. Unfortunately, not long after their wedding, it came to light that Brian had gotten a blowjob from a lapdancer on his stag night and had paid her £15,000 to keep quiet. She didn’t and Brian eventually found himself leaving the band to go solo not long after. He found himslef in much trouble and almost cuckolded at one point for the sake of his marriage.
After this incident, the book goes at breakneck speed towards present day as if she hasn’t done anything of note since, which is a shame because upto that point, it’s actually a great book. Granted, her biggest contribution for TV is as a spokesperson for a discount frozen foods retailer but in terms of tabloid inches she is still worth publishing gold, despite her lack of recent successes which is why Ebury have staked their flag into the still-barren wasteland that is the ghostwritten fiction market.
Kerry brings up (quite honestly) the main undesirable edge of that sword that is fame, probably not the best soceity to be around with bi-polar disorder in the first place:
“Fame finds any cracks in your life and makes them bigger, takes hundreds of photos of them and plasters them all over the front pages for six million people to see. Your life stops being your own anymore.”
So true and she has more than a right to have this opinion as her life has been through the ringer in the red tops with an unprecedented and bizarre amount of interest. Everything from new hair to new man to break up to make up is all there for us to see every week in the glossy magazines with unnerving regularity and when you think life has calmed down for Kerry and she is settled with the new man and the new baby and the perfect life, the cycle of celebrity headlines come round once again full circle until the next haircut, new man, new life.
But the fame angle Kerry has is an opinion that runs throughout this book and we find that celebrities are addicted in many ways to that drug, very much a drug of choice, mind you but still a drug, nevertheless.
But as the pre-publicity heats up for Kerry’s newest venture, pulling the wool over her fan’s (10 million of them apparently) eyes, Kerry has headed back to The Priory, a place she is not unfamiliar with throughout the book, especially post-lapdance blowjob, but this time it has been due to a very emotional and harrowing experience. That of her and her partner being taken by knifepoint and having their home ransacked of over £100,000 worth of possessions including a blue BMW.
The police initially were baffled at how this group of individuals had acheived such a feat of piracy and general fleecing. It turns out the doors were unlocked.
February 20, 2008
There was always something about Kerry that I found real, so when I got this book for Christmas I was really pleased as I thought it would be a good read. It was a good read, but I don't think it was anything special. Kerry has been through a lot for someone so young, and some of the things her mum put her through shouldn't have happened, but Kerry seems to have come through it a better person. The book covers pretty much everything thats ever happened in Kerrys life. I did enjoy it, but it wasn't up there with some other autobiographies that I've read.
Funnily enough since I read this Kerry hasn't been out of the news/magazines, and now I'm sick of reading about her life!!!!
Funnily enough since I read this Kerry hasn't been out of the news/magazines, and now I'm sick of reading about her life!!!!
January 12, 2012
Despise what a lot of people think and say about Kerry Katona I have always (mostly) liked her. I read this book already knowing a lot about Kerry from what she had told us in the past but it was still a shockingly fantastic read and very honest. Unlike a lot of celebrity autobiographies which are actually just written to cash in on their fame this one was very honest and a gripping read. I am reluctant to read her latest book in case that falls into the category of 'cash in' and because you feel like there is nothing more she can tell you that she hasn't already in her OK! column but I probably will read it eventually.
May 14, 2014
I gave up on this....what a load of old SH*T...!! Depressing, repetitive and badly written....
I have read stories and books of abuse and desperation before but for some reason this one didn't grab my interest and sounded a bit too much like everyday life and what goes on around my estate where I live for me to be that bothered.. I congratulate myself on reaching the halfway mark when I should have given up pages and pages and pages before....
I have read stories and books of abuse and desperation before but for some reason this one didn't grab my interest and sounded a bit too much like everyday life and what goes on around my estate where I live for me to be that bothered.. I congratulate myself on reaching the halfway mark when I should have given up pages and pages and pages before....
July 27, 2013
I've owned this book for years but only got round to reading it last night while I was at work. Back in her heyday and after her success on a certain TV show, she was everywhere and this book is quite detailed in the sense of unravelling for the reader how she got to that point. There is no doubt that she has come through a lot and she must be somewhat admired for that, but other than the details I wasn't fully aware of, this book was just a way for me to pass a few hours.
July 23, 2016
I knew some of what Kerry had been through but not all this, pushed from pillar to post and not protected as she should have been by her Mum. No wonder she's had problems in the past. An interesting read.
April 26, 2014
I totally loved this book I love Kerry and felt the book was honest and straight to the point, she had such a hard upbringing but fought the whole way. Was a really good read and kept me interested throughout
September 3, 2007
an insight into how cruel life can be and how one lucky break can make all the difference but you still cannot take anything for granted...
December 28, 2007
really good book she went though a lot poor thing
April 1, 2008
Good read, trufull and sad to think how thr press hound her do much
August 29, 2010
this was one of the best biographies i have read. this poor girl just hasn't had a break once in her life. it's lucky she made Atomic Kitten and got out of her awful homelife.
July 5, 2011
I did actually really enjoy this. It was quite quick and I do wish she had spent more time talking about I'm a celeb. A very emotinal book, which was nice to relax to.
July 19, 2018
I actually have a lot of respect for Kerry Katona but i just count relate to her in this at all.
August 2, 2011
Embarrassingly I really enjoyed this. She has had a very hard life. Complete chav but she's quite sweet.
August 31, 2011
This book was an eye opener as too what she went through as a child highly recommended xx
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August 7, 2011A good read
February 5, 2013
it was very good she had a very hard up bringing
June 7, 2013
Great book, very strong person to cope with all the problems she dealt with
November 30, 2014
Interesting look behind closed doors.
January 2, 2015
I knew she'd had a tough life with her mother and illnesses etc but didn't realise just how bad it had been until I read this.
August 13, 2015
I totally loved this book I felt the book was honest and straight to the point, she had such a hard upbringing but fought the whole way. Was a really good read and kept me interested throughout
August 14, 2015
Not really alot you can say about it. Explains why she is the way she is. Don't waste your money or time on it.
December 11, 2023
A super true read, a sad life for Kerry as a child
January 22, 2025
Interesting but sad to read what she went through
October 9, 2021
One of the most emotional books i have ever read.
This is a beautiful autobiography that is so well written. You don't have to like her but after reading this i guarantee that you will.
This is a beautiful autobiography that is so well written. You don't have to like her but after reading this i guarantee that you will.
September 29, 2022
Amazing read. You go through all the emotions with her.
July 7, 2013
No surprises but a good quick read.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews