There is a picture of Jerry Hall in the paper, looking very fetching as usual (and, incidentally, giving the lie to that dreary axiom that long hair is strictly for teenagers). The accompanying article reminds us that she is busy working on her autobiography, which was commissioned by HarperCollins in a £1 million deal and will be published next autumn.

Right away I get on the phone to my old friend the literary editor to say bags I review it when it comes out. I am well qualified for the job: on my bookshelf, rubbing bindings with Judith Thurman on Colette, Peter Conradi on Iris Murdoch and Deirdre Bair on Simone de Beauvoir, there lurks the jewel of the collection - Jerry's spirited first essay in autobiography, Jerry Hall's Tall Tales (“From Texas to the Top: Her Intimate Story”). Tall Tales was published in 1985, co-written with Christopher Hemphill, whose exotic CV mentions an apprenticeship with Andy Warhol. The new volume is apparently to be a collaboration only between Jerry and her laptop. Jane Austen and Flaubert are said to be her favourite authors, but I hope she won't be unduly influenced by either of them. I loved Tall Tales both for its vivid line in Texan demotic (“redder than a fox's ass in gooseberry time”, for example. And, of her former fiancé Bryan Ferry: “He could be a bit tyrannical”) and for the spirit with which she described her journey from gawky teenage Dairy Queen employee to supermodel and consort of Mick Jagger - the star whose poster image she used to admire on her best friend's bedroom wall, back in junior high school.

The end of the book is poignant. Jerry's first child, Elizabeth, has just been born and Mick buys her a ring: “It's not a wedding ring, but it's the next best thing,” she writes. Oh dear. Well, that was 20 years ago and we are all a bit sadder and wiser these days. For all the vulgar hedonism of the late Seventies and early Eighties, there was a fizzy energy about the era that Tall Tales captures perfectly. But reports of the new autobiography make it sound as though its author plans to take a darker view of her life so far.

“My violent father broke our bones,” reads the headline over a report of the new literary enterprise, describing the vicious beatings that John Hall, a harddrinking trucker, used to administer to his five handsome daughters. “I'm not trying to be vindictive but he certainly gave us a hard time,” Jerry is reported as telling an interviewer. “It is a terrible thing to be living in fear, and he would abuse us verbally, too.”

As revelations go, this one isn't exactly hot out of the oven. Tall Tales contains lurid descriptions of John Hall's violence, culminating in the day when Jerry's 16-year-old twin, Terry, pulled a knife on her father, threatening that: “If you ever hit us again, I swear I'll kill you!” But what is remarkable is the sturdy way in which Hall contextualises the experience in her first book. “He had so much anger in him,” she says of her father. “Sometimes he used to beat us with his belt so bad that we'd have black-and-blue welts on our legs and couldn't go to school. But we never felt that we were abused. It really wasn't that weird. In our town a lot of the kids were beat up.”

Impossible, now, to imagine a celebrity writing that she “didn't feel abused” by being beaten black and blue by her father. These days, the chat-show interviewers would never be satisfied until they had extracted an abject admission that she was in denial of her own victimhood. Composure writes white. Distress sells.

Jerry is a proper pro - Tall Tales has harsh things to say about people who don't throw their heart into what they're doing, whether it's strutting the catwalk or keeping a wayward rock star in some semblance of domestic order. But I find myself hoping that her professionalism and talent for interpreting the latest vogue don't lead her into writing her second volume of autobiography as misery memoir. I have a batsqueak premonition that the genre is on the turn. Too many degraded junkies turn out to have experienced the abyss in no more abysmal form than a bad hangover. Too many memoirists claiming to have been raised by wolves or orphaned by Nazis have subsequently turned out to have passed childhoods of exemplary suburban dullness.

Even biographies whose authors have a strict regard for truth begin to test the limits of public voyeurism. I knew I was all pitied out when the revelation of John Prescott's bulimia left me feeling not compassion, but irritation that a man in such extremity should have been left in charge of the country when his boss was busy elsewhere. So it is with misgiving that I read that Jerry now believes that she was “emotionally scarred” by her childhood, and that she and Mick were “co-dependent”. The language of therapy may help us to reflect on past emotion in relative tranquillity, but its effects on the prose style are lamentable.

I said a moment ago that I hoped Jerry wouldn't succumb to the influence of her favourite authors when writing her memoir. It is true that I hate to think of her in her study, searching in Flaubertian anguish for the perfect adjective or strangling her vivid argot within a corset of genteel Janeite irony. But the three authors do share certain themes: the importance to a woman of having her own money and marrying for love, for example. Then there is that cardinal virtue of Austen's heroines: reticence. In her novels, good girls are emotionally continent; only the vulgar and stupid blurt. “I don't know why everybody doesn't tell the truth all the time. It's much more interesting ...” runs the opening sentence of Tall Tales. It is a principle that the most fastidious 19th-century author might commend: write the truth, eschew psychobabble and make history as the first celebrity memoirist of recent times not to demand the readers' pity while pocketing their cash.

My produce isn't a patch on the picture
The postman has just delivered a seed catalogue, packed with tempting offers. “Dear Miss Shilling,” says the accompanying letter, “we notice that you have not placed an order with us yet this season ...” The trouble is, I do not think I am a natural when it comes to veg-growing. Like Little Grey Rabbit, who planted birdseed and was disappointed when no canaries came up, I suffer from the discrepancy between the picture on the packet and the plant in the pot. The habanero chillies I sowed last year germinated nicely, flowered profusely and produced ... one little yellow fruit the size of my thumbnail.

It was reported this week that sales of veg seeds have outstripped flower seeds for the first time since the Dig for Victory campaign of the Second World War, as families try to grow their way out of a recession. But a dour Mr MacGregor on Farming Today sprinkled Paraquat on that idea, claiming that domestic veg-growing is little more than an expensive hobby for urban Marie-Antoinettes. I'm thinking what a cruelly accurate description this is of my own endeavours when the catalogue falls open at a page of mini-veg: diminutive parsnips, turnips the size of marbles, weeny leeks, dwarf beans. Goodness knows what you'd do with the produce; make meals for Borrowers, I suppose. But there is something preposterous about the enterprise that I can't resist. I have sent off my order and if anything comes up, I'll let you know.

Church champion
Browsing the obits, I come across that of the architectural photographer Christopher Dalton, who for ten years until his death held the post of field officer for the Friends of Friendless Churches in Wales. Oh, the pathos of those friendless churches. In a week when we've been groping towards a definition of national identity, surely the passionate espousal of lost causes has to be high on the list of our island qualities.

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