Disclaimer: This is an act of desperation. I do not usually do this, and I hope never to have to again.

The problem is that by posting on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram in English, the designated reader will probably not read it. His English appears to function selectively.

I do this, therefore, as a form of self-deception. It is a profoundly impotent and probably self-defeating exercise.

But here we are.

So, let the story begin.

I love you, Filip Chajzer.

Admittedly, I did have to look you up on Google, where I discovered that you were the son of a face I once saw on some quiz show playing in the back room of a dark house in Malbork twenty years ago.

Then I discovered you bit by bit, through people who had watched you.

You do have excellent white teeth, like a Turkish shark.

And I do love a celebrity brand. Who doesn’t?

The public trauma.

The product placement.

The redemption arc.

The carefully packaged vulnerability.

The brave confession timed neatly for publication.

I love all of it.

But please pay the invoice. It’s not even much. 3,000 zlotrys is about 700 euros. a teeth whitening aftenoon.

The strange thing is that your book is all about honesty.

Honesty about cocaine.

Honesty about misery.

Honesty about fame.

Honesty about honesty. There is a great deal of honesty.

Honesty piled in lines across the table.

Any more honesty and the book might OD on itself.

but it does n’t include my chapter:

a labourer left him trying to find money for his children’s dental appointment.

Well, it does, I admit, lack glamour.

There is no nightclub.

No South American mafioso.

No ambulance.

No dramatic collapse.

No tearful television appearance.

And the tragedy is there. It genuinely is.

A death that should tear a hole through the entire book.

But we do not feel it.

The terrible suspicion is that Filip does not feel it either—not in the book, not beyond its usefulness as another turn in the narrative.

The tragedy arrives, is described, packaged and placed beside the next escapade.

Monaco in a Lada.

A James Bond episode.

A close shave in Colombia.

Enough to bore the pants off a drunk Brit in Benidorm on a quiet Friday night.

The problem is not that these things did not happen.

The problem is that everything is granted the same dramatic weight.

Death.

Cocaine.

Television.

A ridiculous journey.

A glamorous escape.

A quarrel.

A revelation.

Another anecdote.

The book does not know where to become quiet.

It does not know which events should interrupt the performance.

It does not know which memories ought to silence the narrator rather than provide him with another entrance.

This is not merely a problem of tone. It is a problem of moral proportion.

When everything is interesting, nothing matters.

When every episode becomes evidence of the narrator’s extraordinary life, tragedy loses its capacity to alter the shape of the book. It becomes content.

One begins to wonder whether this is the central problem with the celebrity memoir: everything must return to the celebrity. Every death, addiction, quarrel, romance, humiliation and revelation becomes supporting material in the construction of the Great Interesting Self.

Other people appear as functions.

The father.

The fiancée.

The dealer.

The therapist.

The translator.

Everyone works for the central character.

The book is tiring because it mistakes disclosure for insight.

Something terrible happened.

Then another terrible thing happened.

Then Filip did something reckless.

Then Filip felt awful.

Then somebody explained Filip to Filip.

Then Filip understood that Filip had suffered.

Then another chapter began.

It is not a journey into the self.

It is a guided tour of its gift shop.

The shelves are filled with branded trauma.

Addiction Filip.

Television Filip.

Bereaved Filip.

Therapy Filip.

Funny Filip.

Broken Filip.

Reborn Filip.

International Filip, coming soon, provided someone can turn the entire Polish spectacle into English without making it sound Polish.

But why?

Walk into any English-language bookshop.

The shelves are already full of celebrities who drank too much, took too much cocaine, lost themselves, found themselves, lost themselves again, entered therapy and discovered that beneath the fame was a vulnerable human being.

Actors.

Footballers.

Chefs.

Presenters.

Musicians.

Plumbers.

 Every one of them has a wound.

Every wound has a ghostwriter.

Every ghostwriter has an invoice.

Why would the English-speaking world need another one?

What is the point?

That cocaine is bad?

That fame is lonely?

That television is superficial?

That damaged men damage themselves?

That beneath a celebrity there is a person desperate to remain a celebrity while complaining about what celebrity has done to him?

Stop the presses.

The English edition is not an international literary project.

It is a local fame bubble imagining that the rest of the world is simply Poland with subtitles.

But the world does not know who you are.

That could have been the beginning of an interesting book.

Strip away the recognition, the television history, the accumulated goodwill, the familiar face and the national gossip—and what remains?

A human story, perhaps.

But it would need form.

It would need selection.

It would need distance.

It would need the courage to remove the scenes that exist only because a famous person assumes every episode of his life is inherently worth recording.

It would need someone to say:

This is repetitive.

This is self-serving.

This is not insight.

This anecdote matters only to you.

This explanation has been borrowed from a therapist.

This suffering is real, but it has not yet become literature.

And this death matters more than the next colourful story.

One also wonders how much of the career rests on inherited visibility.

Would the same voice, the same anecdotes and the same appetite for attention have carried an unknown man through the same doors?

Perhaps.

But the book never seems curious about the question.

It accepts fame as a natural property of the narrator, rather than a social arrangement requiring explanation.

That may be the most Polish aspect of the project: the assumption that recognition validates itself.

A celebrity is interesting because he is a celebrity.

A book must matter because people recognise the face on the cover.

A career requires no explanation because the career already exists.

One hesitates to ask whether all Polish celebrities are this dull, or whether the form itself simply encourages dullness, blindness and narcissism by surrounding the subject with people paid to affirm that every memory deserves another chapter.

Instead, the book keeps moving, episode after episode, convinced that accumulation will eventually become meaning.

It does not.

It becomes a list.

A list of dangers escaped.

A list of substances consumed.

A list of famous encounters.

A list of humiliations survived.

A list of occasions on which Filip Chajzer remained, against all probability, Filip Chajzer.

The accumulation never acquires shape.

It becomes luggage.

Heavy, expensive luggage that somebody else is expected to carry.

English cannot make an unexamined book examined.

It cannot turn repetition into structure.

It cannot make a local celebrity universally interesting.

It cannot make tragedy felt simply because tragedy occurred.

It cannot supply moral weight where the narration has flattened everything into anecdote.

And it certainly cannot make a man pay his bills.

So I love you, Filip Chajzer.

But enough.

Pay the fucking bill, buddy! Is that English enough for you?