The Height Of Gossip

Was it enough for Brown to take home an estimated $2 million advance for her first venture into long-form narrative writing?

No, it wasn't.

Will she be satisfied if she sells a zillion copies to the Diana-obsessed?

She will not.

Success, for Brown, will mean convincing the skeptics that she has done something important as well. It will mean capturing a crossover audience, successfully wooing the kind of reader who didn't snap up Andrew Morton's "Diana: Her True Story" or curl up with Kitty Kelley's "The Royals."

And we're a pretty good test case, if we do say so ourselves.

In 1981, we failed to join the roughly 750 million worldwide TV viewers who watched Diana Spencer tie the knot with Charles Philip Arthur George Whatshisname. In 1985, we went slack-jawed with bemusement as our bosses wiped out whole forests with 24-7 coverage of Charles and Diana's Washington visit. (Omigod! She danced with Travolta!) Word reached us, eventually, that the marriage of the century wasn't working out, but we couldn't have distinguished "Camillagate" from "Squidgygate" if you'd offered us the crown jewels.

We're not so hardhearted that we didn't feel bad about Diana's sad end. But we can't help asking, as we approach the 10th anniversary of that paparazzi-haunted Paris crash: Does the world really need another book about Di?

"I don't think of it just as a Diana book," Brown responds.

She set out, she says, to write cultural history, not just celebrity biography. For someone interested in "the '80s and '90s in England, the media and celebrity culture," Diana was the perfect narrative vehicle: a "transitional, emblematic figure who moved between all that."

Fair enough, we think. When Brown focuses on cultural change, she can be fascinating.

She talks about how the public fever for all things Diana -- combined with the princess's adroit exploitation of her Elvis-level celebrity for her own ends -- helped create today's out-of-control celebrity press. A key factor, Brown says, is the sheer volume of photographs in circulation: As a result, "the camera now searches more and more and more for the one image which seems to play against the other images." This means it "invades every corner of your life."