First published by Random House in 2003, Ghetto Celebrity is not a standard memoir and never really tried to be. Donnell Alexander traces the book back to Tupac Shakur’s death, an LA Weekly story about his absent father, and a writing process shaped by weed, pop culture, race, Midwestern Black life and the kind of voice that either grabs you immediately or sends you running. More than two decades later, the book returnsDonnell Alexander did not arrive at Ghetto Celebrity the normal way, and that is part of the point.
Donnell Alexander did not arrive at Ghetto Celebrity the normal way, and that is part of the point.
The book, first published in 2003, began with Tupac Shakur’s death. In the new edition’s introduction, Alexander traces the memoir back to an LA Weekly assignment on Tupac, then to a line from “Papa’z Song,” then to a deeper reckoning with the father he had spent years keeping at a distance. That eventually became “The Delbert in Me,” a reported piece that pushed him toward a full memoir, one that would move through Dave Eggers’ literary orbit before landing at Random House. It was a strange path to a stranger book, and that strangeness still feels like part of its appeal.
Because Ghetto Celebrity: Searching for My Father in Me was never built to behave itself.
It is a memoir, yes, but not the polite, sanded-down version of memoir that tends to travel best through publishing. Alexander frames it instead as something more unruly: a story about fathers and sons, Black identity, small-town Ohio, style, dysfunction, media ambition and self-invention. It is also, unmistakably, a cannabis book, though not in the obvious way. In the introduction to the new edition, Alexander says cannabis consumption in the memoir is “persistent,” a …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
