TMI: My Life in Scandal

by Perez Hilton, Leif Eriksson (Editor), Martin Svensson (Editor)

Overview

“Delicious memoir. . . . catnip for Hollywood gossip hounds.” —Publishers Weekly 

The story of how Mario Lavandeira becomes Perez Hilton, the world's first and biggest celebrity blogger, with millions of readers around the globe. 

With Perez's help, many promising young artists reached the masses—Katy Perry, Adele, Amy Winehouse, and Lady Gaga, to name a few. Soon Perez was a Hollywood insider, but after a dramatic fallout with Lady Gaga, his blog became increasingly mean.  

When people called him a bully and a hypocrite for outing gay celebrities, Perez was forced to reevaluate not only his alter ego, but also himself.  

TMI reveals the man behind the blog in a new, revealing, and still juicy memoir.   

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781641604048
Publisher:	Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,175,256
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 5.80(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Perez Hilton is a celebrity gossip blogger, known and hated from coast to coast. Leif Eriksson and Martin Svensson have written several autobiographies for international celebrities, including UFC star Alexander Gustafsson’s The Mauler and Samantha Fox’s bestseller Forever.

Table of Contents

Prologue vii

1 The Fat Kid 1

2 Latino Culture 7

3 The Diamond Earrings 13

4 My Family Is Torn to Pieces 17

5 Three Years of Silence 21

6 NYC: A Mecca for Gay Men 27

7 Downward Financial Spiral 33

8 Moving to LA 39

9 PageSixSixSix 47

10 Star 57

11 The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf 63

12 A Real Friend? 69

13 A Hot Mess 75

14 RIP 81

15 My Twenty-Ninth Birthday Party 91

16 Radio Perez 97

17 Circus 103

18 Peak Perez 111

19 My Wifey 115

20 Miss USA 125

21 Love Is a Dog from Hell 133

22 The Change 141

23 S&M 147

24 The Big Fallout 153

25 A Ton of Regrets 161

26 I Become a Father 167

27 Dating as Perez Hilton 179

28 Howard Stern 187

29 Celebrity Big Brother UK 195

30 A Home for Me and My Family … and a Year of Pain 205

31 The Hills 215

32 I'm a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! 219

33 Us Now 225

Acknowledgments 229

Editorial Reviews

08/24/2020

Celebrity blogger Hilton (Red Carpet Suicide: A Survival Guide on Keeping Up with the Hiltons) recounts his exploits—and surprisingly self-aware regrets—in this delicious memoir. Growing up gay in 1980s and ’90s Miami, Cuban-American Hilton (“back then,” he reveals “my name was Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr.”) was taunted for his weight and sent to a therapist to “make sure I wasn’t gay.” But he got the last laugh by toggling between New York City (“a mecca for gay men”) and L.A., where he started a red-hot gossip blog. No one was exempt from his snarky repartee as he climbed the fame ladder—something he claims he now regrets, along with other “self-destructive, impulsive” behavior such as selling not-yet-released books online, running up credit card debt and declaring bankruptcy, and alienating Kim Kardashian. Hanging out with the likes of Paris Hilton, Amanda Bynes, Amy Winehouse, and Lady Gaga, Hilton mercilessly spread insider secrets, including the time when John Mayer put his tongue in the author’s mouth. Hilton also waxes poetic (and rather touchingly) about his three children, conceived via surrogate, and how they’ve softened his world view. This is catnip for Hollywood gossip hounds. Agent: Daniel Kim, Arena Scripts Literary & Film Agency. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

“Those looking for a light, dishy read would be remiss to ignore a book by the king of gossip himself.” —Booklist 


“I loved the pop culture journey he took me on. Every chapter reflects on a pivotal year in his career and life while also reflecting in celebrity moments. Fun and inspirational read!” —Lucy, Goodreads ​


“If you think you might enjoy this book...YOU WILL. And no matter what element you're coming for you won't be disappointed. A super fun read that's also a really nice look 'behind the screen' at his life, career, celebrity friends, and family.” —Michael, Goodreads 


“He brings us a very personal and powerful testament of his way of living and seeing the things he's seen. He makes sure we know he's just as human as anybody else and he admits to the things that years later he regrets, and things he’s absolutely proud of.” —Sophie, Goodreads 

From the Publisher

2020-07-29
A blogger tells—or retells—all.

Though you know him as Perez Hilton, he was born Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. in 1978 to Cuban American parents in Miami. Shockingly dull until the celebrities begin to appear, the book, written with Eriksson and Svensson, contains surprisingly little insight about the allure of celebrity. “It’s strange, but when you’re young, you don’t think about the future at all,” writes Hilton in a typically banal passage. “As you get older, however, it’s all you ever think about.” Attempting to find his footing in the entertainment industry, he bounced between New York and Los Angeles “from fiasco to fiasco, with no idea that I’m at the start of a successful career.” His lucky break occurred when, working as a receptionist at the E! channel, he witnessed Janice Dickinson’s assistant stealing pills from her purse. “I stared at him, thinking, Man, this is wild!....Right there and then,” writes Hilton, “I felt an immediate urge to write about what I had just seen on my blog.” Soon thereafter, his blog was dubbed one of the most hated in Hollywood. By the mid-2000s, he had solidified his brand, coining celebrity nicknames (“Brangelina”) and defacing their online photos with crude drawings and captions. Around 2007, he writes, “the tone of my website went from bitchy to downright nasty. The more snarky names I gave the celebrities, the more penises or coke or boogers I drew on pictures of them, the more people visited my page. By this point I was getting between seven and eight million unique hits a day.” After the “hate storm” unleashed by his clueless “It Gets Better” video—he had failed to see the connection between the suicide of gay Rutgers student Tyler Clementi and his own ruthless outing of well-known people—he changed his tune. A little. On the whole, the narrative is fairly tame and unremarkable, featuring numerous pull-quotes and photos without captions, the cutest of which shows Hilton with his children.

A tepid text for die-hard fans only.

Kirkus Reviews