The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir by RuPaul review – poignant, egotistical and often wise

In a witty, highly entertaining memoir, the drag queen turned TV star recounts his journey from homelessness to the dizzying heights of fame via the punk scene – and a snub from Madonna

There is a moment at the end of every series of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the Emmy-winning drag queen reality competition, in which the glamorous host asks the finalists to address their younger selves with words of advice and encouragement. No matter how many times you have seen this happen (since its inception in 2009, there have been 16 US seasons, 20 international editions, eight all-star versions and two celebrity spin-offs), watching the contestants open up about their darkest days remains an astonishingly effective emotional suckerpunch, precision-tooled to wrest tears from the eyes of even the most jaded viewer. In The House of Hidden Meanings, it’s RuPaul Charles’s turn to look back and take stock of his own life, from finding himself homeless in California to posing backstage at Versace surrounded by supermodels.

It is a memoir that is by turns shocking, poignant, fantastically egotistical and often wise, punctuated with equal amounts of LSD-inspired epiphanies as hard-won lessons about sobriety and personal growth (complete with mantras). Each sentence is recognisably in RuPaul’s voice – arch, funny, given to epigrammatic pronouncements – distilling the cadences and assorted pop culture references that have come to characterise his TV persona. We learn the origins of some of his favourite phrases (“Why don’t you pick one up and smoke it sometime?” comes from a Mae West-inspired 60s cigar advert), as well as the influence of role models such as Diana Ross and the “unapologetically rebellious” Cher.

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