'Everything is not an anecdote," Steve Martin's exec tells John Candy's shower-curtain-ring salesman in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. "You have to discriminate ... Here's a good idea: have a point . It makes it so much more interesting for the listener."

This is excellent advice - particularly for new parents, who tend to get carried away by the drama of childbirth and the perilously steep learning curve that follows. It is hard to be discriminating when you are so tired you can hardly keep your eyes open, but if you find yourself in the midst of a minute-by-minute account of your second labour, having already recounted the first in forensic detail, stop and think: did your listener actually say, "Tell me everything there is to know about your labours. Spare me nothing," before you started talking? Birth stories must be told - but not everyone will want to hear them.

Later, when one is becoming a world expert in putting a baby to sleep or changing nappies, or even if your child has secured a place at a really great school, it is helpful to remember that no one except, possibly, your partner, gives a toffee about the blow-by-blow: you are living in an anecdote-poor environment. This is heartbreaking, but true. When your children start to take hard drugs, beat you up and sleep with their drama teachers, then, and only then, will your travails as a parent be of interest to your friends and acquaintances.

Advice of this sort is widely agreed to be spot on - and is almost universally ignored. I know the rules, yet I bore for Britain, and every parent I know has at one time or another returned the favour. Today, thanks to the Heatification of parenthood (as Jenny Colgan once put it), one can even be bored by parents one does not know: papers, magazines and chat shows are chocabloc with celebrities twittering on about how parenthood transformed their lives. This week we've had a heavily pregnant Anna Friel giving her views on post-pregnancy fitness.

It was only a matter of time before celebrity mummy diaries started rolling off the presses; last month we had Brooke Shields' (actually rather gripping) account of her postnatal depression; now Jools Oliver's earnest and staggeringly detailed account of becoming a mother is being published. Jools gives us every stitch of the fabric of her life as a yummy mummy/ celebrity by proxy, and without any sort of adornment - fine writing, say, or jokes. For Jools, everything is an anecdote.

I'm sounding mean, but I don't want to be mean about Jools, who's done no one any harm. For the vast majority of women, the days surrounding the birth of a child are the only time in their lives when they truly feel like the star of the show - of course they want to tell everyone about it. Jools has no career, she has devoted herself to her girls, she has the contacts and apparently has always wanted to write a book - of course she jumped at the chance to write one about motherhood. And probably it'll do quite well, and be of real help to someone.

There are no great insights, but it is exactly what it claims to be: an honest account of motherhood - mastitis, incontinence, and all. There are a billion too many exclamation marks, and the intermittent presence of Jamie fails to lift the book above the level of a common-or-garden baby blog, but that was probably to be expected. We do, after all, already know these people pretty well.

In Jools's defence, one could also argue that as a record of the experience of early parenthood among affluent, self-absorbed metropolitan types in the early noughties, the book may one day prove to be of some value. Jools is nothing if not thorough as she chugs through the nitty-gritty of feeding, dressing and raising small children. I for one found the detail terrifyingly familiar. Vast chunks of the book might have been lifted from conversations my boyfriend and I have actually had, albeit while crazed with sleep deprivation. To routine or not to routine, naughty steps, buggies, the ups and downs of breastfeeding, yada yada - Jools, who is quite some control freak, meticulously plods through it all. Not all of us live in a large house in north London, and have a TV crew under every sink, but even so ... how depressingly cut-out-and-keep the middle-class experience of motherhood turns out to be.

You mustn't buy the book, of course, or Brooke's either - it will only encourage them. Next it'll be Jordan, or even Britney - and I'm not sure we're really ready for their views on potty training.