Nasty (2005)

In between dressing the windows at Barneys New York and working as a VH1 talking head, Simon Doonan has found time to write a truly hilarious memoir that only occasionally dips into self-indulgence in Nasty. There are moments when, seriously, you will full-on spit out your soup, mostly involving his cracked family — schizophrenic granny Narg, hopeless style-victim mom Betty, amateur-winemaker dad Terry — and their happily impoverished escapades in gray industrial England. But more than simply telling how it was, Doonan also paints a gilded, crested, feathered, sequined, and altogether over-the-top picture of how it came to be that this tiny, confused British child — whose only dream in life was to become one of ''the Beautiful People'' — managed to achieve his goal.