YOU HAVE ATTAINED FULL CELEBRITY status. You have the Hollywood agent, the trophy spouse, the swimming pool, the nose-job, the fashionable chien du jour, and the original Damien Hirst hanging above the hot tub. Your friends run the gamut from Sienna to Salman. You can get a table at Sketch. And yet, something is missing in your glittering life, the one distinction that would mark you out as a cut above the other, merely famous, people.

You need to write a novel.

One of the odder side-effects of fame is a craving for the obscure satisfaction that only a slim volume of one’s own can bring. Richard Tull in Martin Amis’s The Information (1995) is enraged that people celebrated for “news casting, cliff-scaling, acting, cooking, dressdesigning, javelin-throwing, and being related to the Queen” also presume to think they can write novels. Famous people do not usually imagine they can also paint a fresco, compose a symphony or write a sonnet.

Andy Warhol reckoned that everyone gets 15 minutes of fame; the next stage, almost inevitably, is to try to parlay that 15 minutes into 250 pages of fiction. Warhol himself “wrote” a: A Novel, a transcript of a recording of 24 hours in the amphetamine-soaked life of his groupies. The book was produced soon after Valerie Solanas shot Warhol, and it reads like it. Speed was of the essence, so the book is full of typing errors. Warhol insisted that the mistakes stayed in, added some more, changed the names and arbitrarily altered anything else that caught his bloodshot eye. The result was profoundly, invincibly unreadable. But, heck, at least it was a novel.

It is easy to make fun of celebrity novelists. So we should.

David Niven, Naomi Campbell, Kirk Douglas, Joan Collins and Dolly Parton have all felt impelled to show us the colour of their prose. Martina Navratilova was paid a huge sum of money to write a trilogy of novels about a tennis player who becomes a crime-fighting sleuth. Gene Hackman wrote Wake of the Perdido Star which described itself as “a novel of shipwreck”; perhaps the publisher meant “a shipwreck of a novel”. Alan Titchmarsh wrote an unpickupable novel about a television gardener.

I have before me Fan-Tan; a novel by none other than the late Marlon Brando, published next month, “a rollicking, swashbuckling, delectable romp of a novel — the last surprise from an ever-surprising legend”. I have read nine pages, but cannot get beyond the description of a man in prison having his fingers eaten by cockroaches (“oh, how delicately they chomped away at the husks of his fingertips”. Sadly, Brando did not live long enough to see the publication of his book. Sadly, I shall not live long enough to finish it.

Some famous people turn out to be rather fine novelists, but usually these tend to be those with an acute sense of irony: Steve Martin, Stephen Fry, Eric Idle and our own David Baddiel. Most celebrity fiction is ferociously bad because most celebrities, by definition, lack the essential ability to stand outside looking in. In John Updike’s words, “as soon as somebody is aware of being ‘somebody’, of being watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen.”

There are exceptions. In her first novel, Pamela Anderson, the ex-Baywatch star, looked inside to reflect her essence, the very core of her personality and fame: namely, two very remarkable breasts. Ms Anderson is a former waitress who went on to become a pin-up and actress with very remarkable breasts; her novel, entitled Star, is about a former waitress who goes on to become a pin-up and actress with very remarkable breasts. So far, so roman-à-clef, though I’m not sure Pammy would put it quite like that.

Mostly, the book is about tits, and what can be done to and with them. It is the story of two misunderstood glands and their journey in search of fulfilment in fullness: Cinderella, with silicone.

Initially, like many first time novelists, Ms Anderson was daunted by the challenge: “A book?” she told one interviewer. “Like chapters, how many pages are in a chapter? How many chapters in a book? I needed some guidance.” She might have answered these questions by opening a book, any book, but instead she hired a ghost writer, and in 28 days he hammered out this classic of the genre, a confection as stiff, fake and perfect as Pammy herself, a monument to her monuments.

It reached No 13 on The New York Times bestseller list. This fact brings the intelligentsia out in vapours, but it does not represent the end of civilisation. Rather, it might be taken as a backhanded compliment to fiction, an art so accessible and adaptable that it can take any amount of abuse. People immeasurably famous in every other way crave the respectability that a novel carries. Stars who have probably never read a novel still want to write one. Anderson’s oeuvre (a sequel comes out later this summer: Starstruck) might even be seen as affirmation of the cultural status of reading; there are many ways to make a name, but the book is what matters most. Pammy herself knows that books are sexy; her latest TV role is in a sitcom set in a bookshop entitled, wait for it, Stacked.

In a lyrical passage in Star, Ms Anderson ghostwrites that her heroine feels “a sense that something was missing, like that feeling you get when you stand looking into the refrigerator, not really hungry, but unable to stop looking, the feeling that this time it might be there, right behind the ketchup and the pickled beets”.

That, of course, is how every celebrity novelist feels: out there somewhere lies literary immortality, that something missing, lurking behind the ketchup of life.

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