“The only direction Britney gave me was that she wanted to die in the video,” said fashion photographer David LaChapelle of the instructions he received for his video of her 2003 single “Everytime”. Recorded in the aftermath of the allegations of infidelity made by her then-partner, Justin Timberlake, and the public shaming she received as a result, the video showed the singer drowning in the bath, pronounced dead at a hospital and even singing in front of her own corpse. It was a fantasy of self-extinguishment that was actualised in many ways, large and small, over the next few years, as an ever more erratic Spears partied hard, shaved her head and got married (for 55 hours) to a childhood friend. Finally, she was hospitalised and had her business interests and professional identity confiscated by her family. “I’m Britney Spears now,” claimed her father.
“One has to wonder who at that point in history would want the job,” writes Philippa Snow in It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me, her altogether brilliant book about the survival of female stars in a world that both wants them and wants to destroy them. Sexualised as a child star, infantilised as an adult, made famous as the world’s hottest virgin—the contradictions of Spears’s personae were almost uncontainable in a single human frame. “Fame on this scale is almost unsurvivable,” writes Snow, whose book profiles 14 women in pairs, including Lindsay Lohan and Elizabeth Taylor, Amy Winehouse and Billie Holiday, but starting with Marilyn Monroe and Anna Nicole Smith, the platinum blonde model whose plea to the jury during court proceedings to determine the fate of her late husband’s fortune gives Snow’s book its title: “It’s very expensive to be me,” she appealed to the jury. “It’s terrible the things I have to do to be me.”
In Smith’s case, the terrible things included 170mm breast implants which ruptured in 1994, requiring three-hour emergency surgery that left her with a lasting addiction to painkillers. The room at the Hard Rock Hotel in Florida, where she was found dead of an accidental overdose of barbiturates in 2006, was strewn with SlimFast cans, nicotine patches, pill bottles and junk food wrappers: a literalisation of Smith’s inner state. The book is a hot mess compendium. Snow writes with a semiotician’s antennae for the subtleties of public personae—Smith merged “the silicone-centric thrust of 90s-era porn with the attire and ambitions of an MGM gold-digger”—but also makes equally bold demonstrations of sympathy, as when she describes Spears, in the middle of her travails, as “a young single mother under great duress, surrounded by opportunities to self-medicate her trauma with both legal and illegal substances”. Spears’s Emma Bovary has met her Flaubert.
Could Snow have written a book about self-imploding male stars from Kurt Cobain to Prince? Almost certainly, although male self-conflagrations have traditionally been deemed a more heroic spectacle, attributable to the wages of genius. The MTV-age public stoning endured by Spears, Lohan and Winehouse was altogether different, their every lapse in decorum, sobriety or taste covered by the 24-hour media in a way that strikes Snow as an exaggerated version of the sniper’s alley faced daily by many women. “Frankly, it is fun to get fucked up,” she writes of her own twenties, when she found herself driven by the “appetites and constitution of, for want of a better phrase, an old-school male artist”. Her previous book, Which as You Know Means Violence? (2022), about art and self-harm in figures such as Buster Keaton and Johnny Knoxville, displayed a keen sense for the weevil of self-destruction that often nestles within the daemon of great talent—an ambivalence that feeds Snow’s sanguinity about the effects of fame in her new book.
“Winehouse’s story was more than a little upsetting, long before the end,” she writes, because “she almost instantly passed the level of public recognition she was able to withstand.” Not the heroin; the fame. A dismaying number of Snow’s subjects were sexually molested as children—Louise Brooks, violated by a neighbour at age nine; Joan Crawford, raped by her stepfather at 11; Jane Fonda, sexually abused by a babysitter’s boyfriend and later a family friend; Billie Holiday, raped at 10; Pamela Anderson, molested by a babysitter as a child and raped at 12 by a family friend—so many that you cannot but wonder if the process of becoming famous wasn’t simply a continuation of that despoilation: a swap of one abuser for another.
Many critics of Snow’s generation may share her feminism—and anger—but not her clearheadedness about fame
This sits uncomfortably with many critics of Snow’s generation who may share her feminism—and anger—but not her clearheadedness about fame, and would prefer to coopt these women’s lives for bright, shiny empowerment narratives. Monroe has already received that treatment, but then Monroe had the comedic gifts to allow her reputation to rebound. The ground zero for such arguments, these days, is Pamela Anderson, whose career has received the 200-volt defibrillation of a Netflix documentary, a 2022 biopic and a Gia Coppola film, The Last Showgirl, which generated awards chatter earlier this year. But Anderson’s own autobiography, Love, Pamela, evinced enough ambivalence about her objectification in the pages of Playboy, “as both a blessing and a cure, a source of disempowerment and empowerment,” writes Snow, that it is difficult to fit her into “the tidy, orderly brand of feminist-revisionist history that is so popular at present”.
Snow is her own kind of feminist-revisionist, but she is anything but tidy and orderly, too in love with the mess and luxuriant sprawl of these women—with their slimming drugs and pill addictions, their surgeries and implants, their crash diets and DUIs. Neither does she present them as cautionary tales of old, but something altogether sadder and more gorgeous, which only a writer of Snow’s gifts could properly evoke. For its blend of sure-shot observation, insurgent momentum and human sympathy, It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me deserves a place next to other recent essay collections such as Claire Dederer’s Monsters (2023) and Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror (2019), both of which disproved the old adage that essay collections don’t sell.
Perhaps, instead, that adage should be adapted: with the exception of Geoff Dyer, men’s essay collections don’t sell. The New York Times bestseller lists are regularly thronged with essay collections from women writers who have come up through what Slate’s Laura Bennett so memorably called the “first-person industrial complex”: that tidal wave of personal essays in the 2010s, with titles such as “My Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina” and “My Former Friend’s Death Was a Blessing”, most of them written by women on sites like Gawker, Jezebel, Salon and BuzzFeed.
This move into print was something of a mixed blessing. From her perch at Jezebel, where she worked as an editor from 2013 to 2016, Tolentino—the model for this new breed of internet-savvy essayist, flitting from hyperlink to hyperlink—received at least a hundred such first-person pitches each week and tried to alert many of their authors to the downsides of putting embarrassing stories about oneself on the record for not very much money. As a teenager, she took part in a reality show, Girls vs Boys: Puerto Rico, and was also a member of an evangelical megachurch. She squeezed both experiences for every ounce of insight into the performative nature of online identity in Trick Mirror, a book notable for the honesty and accuracy with which Tolentino writes about herself—candour that is as much a matter of character as it is style.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Lauren Oyler, famous for slash-and-burn reviews of her contemporaries—her 2020 take-down of Tolentino’s book was shared so many times that the London Review of Books website crashed in the aftermath. The title of Oyler’s most recent essay collection, No Judgement (2024), is ironic, for she has nothing but pithy judgements to dispense on such topics as autofiction, vulnerability, Ted talks, her own hypochondria or negative Google reviews left for her friend’s bagel shop. Oyler, who was once called by Ann Manov in Bookforum “the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot”, summons a critical voice perfectly attuned to the niggles and petty grievances of online discourse: “I think ‘Why I’m Right’ should be the subtext of any piece of critical writing,” she writes, although, for someone who is keen to describe herself as a literary critic, her book is notable for its absence of actual literary criticism. She does mention in passing that Norman Rush’s Mating is her favourite book.
“Her essays contain not arguments or judgements so much as advertisements for a conspicuously edgy personality,” wrote Becca Rothfeld in her review of Oyler’s collection for the Washington Post. A Dartmouth-Cambridge-Harvard trained critic, Rothfeld’s own frighteningly smart essay collection, All Things Are Too Small (2024), is the opposite: it bristles with needle-sharp arguments against the minimalism of decluttering guru Marie Kondo (“adventures in parsimony”), the political passivity of the “mindfulness” bandwagon, as well as an essay on Ingmar Bergman’s Persona which dovetails into an account of Rothfeld stalking her ex’s new girlfriend online. Rothfeld also loves Rush’s Mating, which she quotes compulsively and at length—an urge that “springs from the same source as the compulsion to show friends a love letter, in a futile effort to relive the experience of receiving it”.
If a writer has gone to all the trouble of describing something accurately, it testifies to a deep relish for the material world of which art, too, is a part
It’s certainly not futile if such a comparison results in the reader going off to read Mating for themselves, to find out what the fuss is all about. Rothfeld is the real deal: rigorous, razor-sharp, less inclined to pronounce judgement on a book or film than to simply describe her experience of it. Oyler could do with nailing up in her office somewhere this maxim from John Updike’s 1990 memoir Self-Consciousness: “description expresses love”. Judgement is merely the MacGuffin of criticism: the bauble everybody chases, though it turns out to be just a ruse to get the reviewer out of bed. But if a writer has gone to all the trouble of describing something, accurately—even if it is Donald Trump’s exact shade of orange—then that description testifies to a deep, finger-painting relish for the material world of which art, too, is a part. “What just happened to me?” is the question Pauline Kael used to ask herself upon exiting a movie she was to review. The best critical writing is a physiological report of one person’s encounter with a work of art.
What makes Philippa Snow a good critic, with the makings of a great one, is that her descriptive powers are world-class. Take this account of Anna Nicole Smith’s yearbook photo—with “dolent eyes, an air of hunger; a gaze not quite focused on the here and now”. Or this of Amy Winehouse’s body language: “plush and lewd and lazy” (say it out loud). Or this of Kristen Stewart, “unleashing her magnificence with the unbothered nonchalance of a yawn”. The great Kenneth Tynan would have been happy with that. Find someone who writes about anything the way Snow writes about Kristen Stewart—then let her loose on this hot mess of a world.
