“To me, the dumbest quote in the world is the one that’s like ‘Great minds talk about ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.'”
Celebrity Memoir Book Club co-host Claire Parker says this when I ask her about the social value of celebrity gossip. Ideas are generated by people; events are given meaning by people, understanding others and the way we relate to them is one of our most important human drives. It’s a sentiment that encapsulates the ethos of her podcast, co-hosted with best friend and fellow comedian Ashley Hamilton.
On their show, Claire and Ashley discuss, of course, celebrity memoirs—but they also use these texts as a lens for sharp commentary on ageing, fame, and friendship. Their approach to celebrity culture is rooted in a simple truth: talking about people, famous or not, allows us to establish social values and explore what’s arguably the only genuinely interesting thing in the world—human behaviour.
When I learned CMBC would be touring Australia this September, I reached out immediately. As someone who’s spent countless hours—approximately four a week for the past three years—listening to their voices, part of this is a parasocial urge. But I also wanted to know: How do they navigate their paths as comedians and podcasters? What’s their take on the ethics of celebrity gossip? And how do they see the relationships they’ve cultivated with listeners like me?
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It’s 6pm in New York when Claire and Ashley squeeze into the square on our video call.
We start with the origin story of Celebrity Memoir Book Club:
Claire and Ashley have been podcasting together fairly continuously since meeting in 2018, and CMBC is their third venture. Their first podcast focused on Britney Spears, but they decided to end it when the Free Britney movement gained mainstream traction and it became less clear what was conspiracy and what was horrible truth.
“As two comedians, we didn’t want to speculate humorously over somebody possibly being in captivity,” Claire explains.
Their second show, “We’re in a Fight with Claire and Ashley,” aimed to dissect female friendship through their own arguments.
“We wanted to talk about female friendship the way people talk about dating,” Claire says.
But, she adds, “It didn’t go well. We fought constantly and it was actually really toxic to look at friendship through the lens of your fights.”
They figured it was better to return to discussions about outside material—a decision that coincided with the release of pretty big celebrity memoirs.
Claire and Ashley realised two important things: one, that talking about celebrity memoirs was really fun, and two, it felt like fair game.
“It wasn’t like Britney, where we were speculating based off of cryptic captions and facial expressions. This was actually what they were writing down for us to discuss,” Ashley says.
This is one of the facets of the show that I’ve always found interesting: the way CMBC uses memoir to engage in celebrity gossip without transgressing personal boundaries.
Right now, fame is changing—who mediates it, what type of access we expect from public figures. As a society, we’re grappling with bizarre debates, like whether it’s acceptable to stalk Chappell Roan’s family because we liked her song Casual.
There is a gross aspect to that level of entitlement, but there’s complexity to conversations about the lives of celebrities—we need to uphold boundaries, but we still need ways to discuss the figures who shape our social narratives.
Where do Claire and Ashley draw the line? What’s off-limits?
“My personal boundary is that whatever you put out there to get complimented on is also open for criticism,” Claire says.
She cites Jennifer Lopez as an example: “Why are we allowed to know about her divorce? Because she just spent $20 million making a movie telling us that she had the greatest marriage in America.”
Claire argues we’re allowed to speculate about the facets of J.Lo’s life that she put in the public sphere, but off-screen issues—her health, her children, the parts of her life that she hasn’t commercialised—don’t belong in the conversation.
Of course, not everyone views celebrity discourse as serious work. Pop culture analysis is often dismissed as frivolous—but to Claire and Ashley, that’s mostly irrelevant. Their audience is 94% women; that’s who pays their bills.
As Ashley puts it, “What a man thinks has literally nothing to do with me. If he doesn’t take it seriously, what’s he going to do? Sit there and tell me I don’t have a very successful podcast?”
***
Still, CMBC isn’t without its critics. Claire and Ashley aren’t afraid to disagree—with each other or with their listener demographic at large. They’re not overly sympathetic towards Blake Lively and are currently at war with the concept of “girl’s girls”, which they believe is a symptom of a pathological cultural need to moralise the arbitrary reasons we like or dislike people.
They don’t believe having a sad childhood gives you a free pass to write a bad memoir nor do they understand why their audience needs them to love Brat. There’s often visible friction as they navigate running a business with a friend. All of this gets them labelled, at times, mean—which is, of course, the price of saying anything interesting in the public sphere.
But I think this misses the point. If anything, what I admire most about Claire and Ashley is their earnestness. I like their insistence on holding both themselves and the celebrity memoirists to high standards of growth, and their steadfast commitment to celebrating friendship in a romance-oriented world.
***
Towards the end of the call, they ask if I want to go to their Melbourne show. I say I already have tickets—I’m going with an ant scientist from BumbleBFF, actually. To me, it feels like we’ve been friends for years—but oddly enough, they don’t invite me for drinks or suggest a sleepover in their hotel room.
Talking to them is actually a little uncanny, like waving to a friend in a dream where they can’t recognize you. Of all the public figures it feels like I know, nobody takes up more physical air time or mental real estate than podcasters. Because their episodes aren’t subject to scheduling conflicts, I’m strangely more in tune with Claire and Ashley’s day-to-day mishaps than I am with many of my actual friends. But on Zoom, I’m still faced with this truth—that I don’t really know them at all, and they know me even less.
I email them later and ask how they feel about the parasocial relationships their listeners develop. They reply that, of course, they love when people connect to them—it’s an incredibly intimate medium.
“But it’s also important for us to not put too much personal stock in those relationships because when they switch (which sometimes they do) we can’t take it personally.”
I find myself reflecting on all the public figures who exist in my head, in our collective consciousness—celebrities or podcast hosts—and what exactly we want from them. Because art feels like an extension of a person, it’s easy to feel like consuming creative work gives us access to them.
But Claire and Ashley’s podcast isn’t an invitation to join their friendship, just as Chappell’s discography isn’t a call to hug her on the street, and a memoir isn’t an unmediated pass into someone’s private life. Instead, it’s a chance to understand our distance.
It’s an opportunity to recognize the facets of themselves that public figures choose to share, and the parts they keep to themselves—the things we’re given access to, and the things we only watch unfold.