Celebrities are the most widely discussed people in the world, yet critic Philippa Snow writes about them as though their deep significance to society is entirely overlooked. Just like many of the famous women she makes her muses – Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears – Snow came of age in the 00s, an era defined by its aggressive style of paparazzi coverage. Like many of us who witnessed this conflation of media entertainment and surveillance, the author became obsessed with, in her own words, the “gaps between person and persona” – in particular, “[the things people] do to themselves in order to better adapt to fame”. When the critic wrote Trophy Lives last year, she proposed that fame is an exhaustive form of self-manipulation and mythologisation worthy of art status. Her new book, It’s Terrible The Things I Have to Do To Be Me, which borrows a quote from model and actress Anna Nicole Smith, probes even deeper beneath the surface of the female celebrity to examine the brutal demands enforced upon her – how patriarchy shapes famous women, both physically and culturally, and the influence of this spectacle on everyone watching.
Because of the meticulous way Snow traces every inch of their lives and the dark connections between them, her subjects are infused with a fictive spirit: they read less like real people and more like characters from the same surreal novel: “Here was a woman,” she writes in her opening chapter on Smith, “who had modelled her life so closely on Marilyn Munroe’s that it eventually killed her.” She draws comparisons between the self-made bodies of trans bond girl Caroline ‘Tula’ Cossey and Pamela Anderson; Elizabeth Taylor and the idea of her uncanny reincarnation as Lindsay Lohan, and the tragic rise and fall of two jazz singers, Amy Winehouse and Billie Holiday. Blending essayistic flair with sharp, punchy writing, these essays lay bare the raw, ecstatic sides of womanhood that readers will either resonate with or find wildly entertaining to discover.
Here, we talk to Snow about the horrors of being a famous woman, the inherent misogyny in transphobia, Sabrina Carpenter, and the relationship between sexiness, sexuality, and feminism.
What drew you to writing about fame? You mention in the book growing up watching a ‘panoptic coverage’ of women’s failures – their supposed lapses of decorum, sex appeal, and so on.
Philippa Snow: The loose thesis of the book is the one that I outline in the introduction: that it’s possible to see the female celebrity as a metonym for womanhood itself, in the sense that she is placed under many of the same pressures as the average woman, but more so – the difference being like that between looking at your pores in a normal mirror and flipping over to the magnified side, to use an appropriately feminine simile. There’s certainly an element here of my trying to make sense of the cruel, misogynistic celebrity culture I was exposed to in my most formative years, and of the effect that it had on my psychological development.
I’m also fascinated by the desire to be famous as it appears in other people, not only because the mechanisms via which fame is achieved have historically been so tough for women, but also because it’s a desire I can’t ever imagine having myself. It seems like a waking nightmare to have to be perceived on that scale, even when it brings positive attention. So I wonder if there’s a little bit of it for me, also, that’s like exposure therapy, or like pressing on a bruise. I’m now picturing myself as that screaming woman with the olive phobia being menaced with a jar of olives on Maury Povich at the turn of the millennium.
You write about how certain female celebrities can be defined by their tragic twists of fate. It feels both devastating and uncomfortably poetic to draw these connections between their lives. What do you think they say about celebrity culture?
Philippa Snow: I’m a writer who is interested, basically, in a lot of sweeping, visceral themes, and in the areas of overlap between them: sex; violence; femininity; genius and madness; body horror; the division of the self. That’s true when I’ve written about 1970s performance art in the past, and it’s also true when I’m writing about reality TV, or the contents of The National Enquirer. When you notice these patterns in the lives of female celebrities, decades apart, it makes it obvious that while elements of the experience of female fame have changed with the times, certain requirements have remained consistent. The star machine has been polished to a sheen, but the machinery inside it is essentially the same. What that means is that as well as resembling each other, these women’s stories also often end up resembling myths, or parables. I don’t want to say cautionary tales, because reducing many of these women to just victims would be too simple, and it would deny them their agency.
It’s also interesting to note that the rise-and-fall structure of female fame is now such a familiar tale that we have to consider the fact that no adult woman entering into this social contract is doing so with her eyes entirely closed to the possibility of suffering or abasement. That’s something I wanted to look at without passing any moral judgement on the woman at each narrative’s centre, too – the almost sadomasochistic power dynamics that exist between famous women, the industry, and fans, and what those dynamics might tell us about womanhood in general.
It’s no wonder Britney Spears shaved her head – she was trying to keep herself from having to be a one-woman representative for her nation, for the 00s, for sex appeal, for the ideal woman, and so on
While reading the book, I found myself thinking a lot about celebrity culture and empathy. It’s not always easy to empathise with celebrities, particularly when you consider their class positions, but, in some instances, a lack of empathy can reveal something deeply uncomfortable about our culture, such as its treatment of women – take the now memeified picture of Britney Spears shaving her head. Why do you think fame wields such power to complicate how we choose to use, or not use, empathy?
Philippa Snow: I imagine it has something to do with the relationship between celebrity image-making and the idea of perfection. For a very long time, the general idea was that a star, and a female star especially, had to be this almost superhuman creature: thin, rich, beautiful, fashionable, desirable, always young or young-looking. Immortal-seeming, really. This conception of these women as being somehow elevated and inherently special leads, I think, to a desire to undercut them in some way – to bring them down to size, which is to say to shrink them down from a Godlike scale into something far closer to our own.
There’s also the fact that, as I say in the essay about Britney Spears, very extreme forms of fame can transform a person not just into an icon, but into a piece of iconography, and abstracting someone and turning them into a symbol puts them at risk of not being treated like a real, feeling person. When I think about Britney at her peak, I always think of those Ted Hughes lines about looking at Sylvia Plath: ‘So this is America, I marvelled. Beautiful, beautiful, America!’ It’s no wonder she shaved her head – she was trying to keep herself from having to be a one-woman representative for her nation, for the noughties, for sex appeal, for the ideal woman, and so on.
Another celebrity you discuss in the book is Pamela Anderson. I couldn’t help but think about the recent Sabrina Carpenter album cover controversy while reading about how both feminists and anti-feminists interpret Anderson and her hypersexualised public persona. How do you think public perceptions of female sexuality have changed since Anderson’s rise to fame?
Philippa Snow: The answer to this, given the days-long backlash to the Sabrina Carpenter album cover, might be ‘less than we think.’ That said, the question of what constitutes – and I’m sorry to use this word – ‘empowerment’ in the context of women monetising their sexuality is multifaceted and complex enough that it’s not really surprising that we haven’t managed to reach a satisfying consensus over the span of a couple of decades. (As if there’s ever been such a thing as total consensus in feminism, anyway.)
You make an interesting comparison between Anderson and Carpenter, because viewed from one angle, there’s some crossover between the former’s heyday schtick, and what the latter is doing now: a sexiness that’s sort of bawdy rather than full-bore explicit; an undertone of girlishness and sweetness; an overall impression that we’re watching a smart woman playing dumb. The difference now is that we talk about Sabrina Carpenter as ‘catering to the female gaze,’ which was not something that could really have been said about Pam in the 90s, even though she’s always had a lot of female fans. We’re ready now to accept that a woman can be a very sexed-up blonde and also be funny and have ideas, which is a wonderful progression. Less wonderful is the requirement that such women now publicly perform their presumed feminism in exactly the right way; a sexualised album cover isn’t simply framed as an anti-feminist cash grab, but dissected in the discourse as a failed feminist statement. It’s not a worse state of affairs, by any means – but it does become a new issue for the stars of the present to anticipate every time they show some skin.
The misguided idea that women who alter their appearances, even simply with makeup, are somehow ‘tricking’ those around them reaches its apotheosis in transphobia, which uses a woman’s medical history as proof that she is somehow “lying” to the world about who she is.
In your chapter on Anderson and Caroline Cossey, you describe how both of these women adapted and reshaped their bodies to become desirable. Something that both trans people and feminists have argued for decades is that our genders are socially constructed: do you think the fact that both of these women’s bodies are overtly self-made is part of what makes them such controversial figures?
Philippa Snow: I absolutely do – the misguided idea that women who alter their appearances, even simply with makeup, are somehow “tricking” those around them reaches its apotheosis in transphobia, which uses a woman’s medical history as proof that she is somehow “lying” to the world about who she is. (Never mind that such medical procedures are often one of the things that help her to feel fully like herself in the first place.) In a sense, what are things like breast implants and minimising nose jobs if not forms of gender-affirming surgery, even when they’re being performed on a cis woman? They’re still very much about ‘feminising’ the face and body in accordance with the very narrow parameters that the beauty standard sets for desirable women.
Pamela Anderson and Caroline Cossey both built themselves into these streamlined, golden sex-goddess figures, and then ended up being unfairly punished with invasive tabloid exposes. Cossey, of course, faced potentially more dangerous consequences for being outed as a trans woman than Anderson did over the leaking of her sex tape, but there were still parities there. In both cases, there seemed to be a sense of media-driven entitlement – a desire to take something from them by force, even though they’d already offered the public so much of themselves. You know, it’s the age-old thing: be effortful; look effortless; shut up.
‘It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me’ was published July 3, 2025 by Virago Press.
