Writing a Celebrity Profile

     When you're writing about a [famous] person, one of the problems you encounter is that the reason the person is worthy of being profiled is not necessarily because they are good at talking about what they do. That's where the writer comes in. It's not her [the celebrity's] job to make my story good, it's my job to make my story good. So I write a story about what I would have asked her if she'd been awake and what I think she would have said.

     I grew up reading celebrity profiles, and I hated most of them. The ones I didn't hate all have the same quality, which was that the writer was not in bed with the subject. It's very easy to become so dazzled by a celebrity that by the time you write it, it's me and the subject doing something for your benefit, the reader. Like this is what it's like to be friends with this person. But that's not what a profile should be, because I'm not friends with that person. And we didn't have something that emulated friendship. We had a weird, short, intense relationship that we both knew the length of, the extent of, and the stakes of. I am the reader in those situations. I want the reader to know that I know what my job is. My job is to go there and to tell you what it would have been like if you were there. 

Taffy Brodesser-Akner in "How Taffy Brodesser-Akner Writes a Celebrity Profile," by Isaac Butler, slate.com July 13, 2020