Red Carpet Suicide: A Survival Guide on Keeping up with the Hiltons

As a daily reader of PerezHilton.com, I was curious to see what his book was like. Turns out it’s funny, sarcastic and quite clever.

He has twelve steps to becoming what he’s dubbed a “hilton”. A “hilton” is a celebrity more famous for their ridiculous personal lives than actually doing anything of worth. These twelve steps include getting a DUI, whoring out your kids for money and milking your celebrity status for all the money you can get.

If you’re smart enough to know better, you can laugh at his suggestions of how to be a hilton and see that although they’re funny, it’s really quite sad because it’s all true. These things are really how people acquire fame and keep our interest. Unfortunately, young girls are very impressionable and are apt to take these steps seriously to get attention. For me, it was funny and interesting to learn more about how these hilton’s lives really work, like how they often call the paparazzi and have deals with companies to be seen wearing/eating/drinking/using their product.

Perez also includes a section about what he sees for the future of this crazy celebrity world. More than just making scandalous predictions about today’s young stars’ future fuck-ups, he writes like the celebrity expert that he is. He understands celebrity culture, the media and how it affects the average public. Although he writes about it in a light-hearted way, beneath that you can tell that he’s really not condoning this behavior, he’s just giving the people what they want: celebrity gossip.

In the last section of the book, Perez describes his life as a celebrity gossip blogger. I was intrigued to learn about where he gets his information, his repertoire with certain celebrities, and what publicists really do to get their client’s name and reputation out there.

With a forward by Andy Warhol “from heaven”, and an epilogue from Perez in response, I saw the connection that Perez Hilton is this generation’s Andy Warhol. Because Andy was right about everyone having their 15 minutes of fame in the future, and to all aspiring “hiltons”, Perez is the mentor they have to inspire and impress to get their 15 minutes (or more).