It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me: 'A brutal and brilliant study of female celebrity' Megan Nolan, Telegraph
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*One of the Telegraph's Greatest Books of 2025*
'I love Philippa Snow's writing, truly and deeply' Lena Dunham
'A brutal and brilliant study of female celebrity ... a joy to read, fizzing with intelligence' Megan Nolan, Telegraph
'Wildly entertaining' Dazed
'Snow's prose is beautiful, white-hot and breathless, like a sports car speeding through the canyon' Observer
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How does an icon become an icon? How did Anna Nicole Smith model herself on Marilyn Monroe? What connects Lindsay Lohan with Elizabeth Taylor? How is self-made beauty Pamela Anderson like trans Bond girl Caroline 'Tula' Cossey?
In a series of interconnected essays about pairs of famous women, award-nominated essayist and art critic Philippa Snow explores the echoes and connections between a constellation of female stars and lays bare the artful and gruelling demands of femininity - from the golden age of Hollywood to the Instagram era. Full of the fascinating, entertaining and lurid details you might expect from the lives of mega-famous celebrities, dissected with icicle-sharp intelligence and rendered in stylish, flamboyant prose, Philippa Snow's first full-length non-fiction work is a radically insightful book about the complex meanings and layers of femininity in a male-dominated world.
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Praise for It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me
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A brutal and brilliant study of female celebrity ... a joy to read, fizzing with intelligence - TelegraphTurns female celebrity inside-out. Insightful and graceful, and one of the most enjoyable books of the yearA fascinating, wry and entertaining reclamation of famous women's subjectivityAn instant classic from the sharpest cultural critic working today. I couldn't put it downSharp, unflinching, provocative - AnOther MagazineIts blend of sure-shot observation, insurgent momentum and human sympathy deserves a place next to other recent essay collections such as Claire Dederer's Monsters and Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror - ProspectAt once a symphony and a manifesto, a virtuoso performance of feminist criticism ... not to be missedThis book will make you feel things; it's sparkling and dark and utterly addictive. It needed to exist
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