It was an orange sweatsuit that first brought Messrs Steven Phillips-Horst and Lily Marotta, the hosts of the boldface-memoir-skewering podcast Celebrity Book Club, together on the seventh grade playground. “I remember spotting Steven in this all-orange outfit and thinking, he is gay, we will be friends,” says Marotta, who uses they/them pronouns, over cocktails at the Nine Orchard hotel in downtown Manhattan.

“They were zip-up cargos,” Phillips-Horst quickly clarifies.

“Very modular, very European, very walking through SoHo with 10 Diesel shopping bags,” says Marotta. And with that, they are off, whipping through references and “verys” and affixing them to the subject at hand with an ease and uncanny exactness that listeners of their podcast will immediately recognise.

The pair, both 35, grew up near each other in Boston – Marotta in Cambridge, Phillips-Horst in Newton – and became best friends when they met at 13. Their cosy yet lightning-speed chemistry is the engine that runs Celebrity Book Club, a weekly podcast that began in January 2021. Each week they read a book, usually a celebrity memoir or occasionally a historical autobiography, then convene to parse the material. Subjects range from standard pop-culture mainstays, such as the singer Ms Jessica Simpson and Ms Ramona Singer, one of the real housewives of New York City, to elevated figures such as the art collector Ms Peggy Guggenheim or Mr Benjamin Franklin, founding father of the US.

“We like to switch it up,” says Marotta. “To do a fab actress, then do, like, Ulysses S Grant [the US president from 1869 to 1877].”

When we speak, the most recent episode is a dive into Ms Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries, which chronicled the editor’s time running the magazine in its 1980s and 1990s heyday. “That book really resonated with me,” says Phillips-Horst, who channels Brown’s ethos for Celebrity Book Club. “I want to make something really highbrow with hard, cutting political analysis, but also be funny and sassy and sophisticated and glamorous and edgy and rude and sexy and fun. And show a little bit of leg, darling!” he says, affecting his best clipped Brown impression. “It’s all about the mix.”

In addition to the podcast, Phillips-Horst has a regular column, “Talk Hole”, on the website Gawker with another writing partner, Mr Eric Schwartau, and moonlights as a copywriter. He recently wrote an essay for The Guardian about the pitfalls of self-help books. Marotta is an actor and comedian, whose credits include a role on HBO’s High Maintenance and the web series Monica: The Miniseries about Ms Monica Lewinsky (which Marotta co-produced).

A cursory knowledge of Boston references from the 1990s and 2000s is helpful, but not necessary for listening. The now-shuttered Jasmine Sola boutique and the Tower Records on Mass Ave make appearances that will make any Bostonian listener either wince or chuckle with recognition.

The pair spent their teens strolling the city’s fashionable shopping corridor, Newbury Street, where Phillips-Horst was particularly enthralled by the Marc by Marc Jacobs store and Marotta would drag their parents to Versace where they would “pet the clothes” and obliging salespeople would give them the latest look books. “I was just this weird kid in a big Patriots jacket who loved tailoring and suits,” they say. Marotta initially studied fashion at the School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago and had an early foray into illustration, but quickly pivoted to performance.

“I was really into boho at the end of high school,” says Phillips-Horst. “Totally deranged. I was obsessed with Mary-Kate [Olsen], Diesel jeans, cardigans, kimonos, motorcycle jackets, ordering necklaces on Amazon. It was the opposite of the Coco Chanel line.” He went on to attend NYU.

Fashion and style are rich territory for the two in life and on the pod, as evidenced by a recurring feature on Celebrity Book Club that has the enigmatic title “segments”. They close each episode with a conjectured jaunt into the life and habits of that week’s subject: what does she wear? What does she eat? How does she live? Here they flex their muscles as taxonomists of taste and consumption. Is she very gauzy tank (the TV personality Ms Lauren Conrad) or very “Cambridge mom” (the US senator Ms Elizabeth Warren)? Is she very Westin breakfast (the actress Ms Teri Hatcher) or is he very veal scallopini (the former tennis player Mr Andre Agassi)? Is she high bed or low? And so on.

These forays beyond the pages of the books are when the hour really sings. Their sardonic play by play of Ms Megan McCain’s Bad Republican is a knee-slapper, but the improvised digression into the possibilities of her theoretical “Target-glam” coffee table is nothing short of sublime. What they do is not simply poke fun at the absurd art of the celebrity memoir but gild its pages for the listener by asking the real questions. What do Simpson’s countertops actually look like? What does Conrad have against aeroplane blankets?

With so many memoirs now under their belt, their understanding of the form is thorough, but don’t expect a book from them any time soon or a career pivot to ghostwriting. “It’s humiliating and degrading to write stuff for other people, and you don’t get any of the credit,” says Phillips-Horst, who used to work in politics and speech-writing.

Marotta prefers the books that have the least amount of ghostwriting, which are “basically written through Google Voice”. They cite the former model Ms Janice Dickinson’s ribald No Lifeguard On Duty as the height of such a style.

Much as they love curling up with people such as the singer-songwriter Ms Sinéad O’Connor or the actress Ms Demi Moore each week, reading a new book every seven days can be punishing. They admit to cramming at the last minute or the occasional strategic skimming. “It’s always finals week for us – messy bun, sweatpants,” says Phillips-Horst.

They have begun doing live events, recently in San Francisco and New York, where they can commune with their listeners and sell merchandise, which at the moment is baseball caps and T-shirts. The book club universe is expanding and its hosts couldn’t be more pleased.

“Our real interests are martinis and hotels – the podcast is an excuse to get there,” says Phillips-Horst, half joking but not really.

Much like Brown, he says, who “did care about the news, but also her chief interests were eating at the Four Seasons and dinner parties. If having a podcast is a vehicle to get martinis and have photoshoots, that’s fine. That is the point of life.” Martinis And Photoshoots sounds like a memoir worth reading.