It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me: On Femininity and Fame – book review

In a series of essays about pairs of famous women, the cultural critic Philippa Snow explores the connections between them and the distinction between person and persona

It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me: On Femininity and Fame, by Philippa Snow, published by Virago.

by CHRISTIANA SPENS

In 2006, when the America model and actor Anna Nicole Smith tried to explain, in court, why she deserved to inherit a proportion of her late billionaire husband’s estate, she said: “It’s very expensive to be me … It’s terrible the things I have to do to be me.” She delivered this line charmingly, but in the context of the court case, with the extensive receipts of her lifestyle shared to all, her words were ultimately damning; in the end, she did not receive anything. She had already been the recipient of vast wealth from her octogenarian husband, whom she had married in 1994, but she had spent her gifts and allowances as quickly as she received them.

The cultural critic Philippa Snow (author of Which As You Know Means Violence, 2022, and Trophy Lives: On the Celebrity As an Art Object, 2024) takes this statement for her latest title, writing not only about Smith and Smith’s idol, Marilyn Monroe, but a further 12 female celebrities, all considered in pairs according to their parallels and influence on one another. In each case, the persona they presented to the world, or which was presented on their behalf, involved a lot of work, sometimes even some terrible things, and in many cases, near or actual death. The persona of the famous star, each one celebrated and judged according to the governing gender rules of the day, became in various ways a consuming phenomenon of its own, with the individual behind the mask paying the price.

By studying female celebrities with insights from psychoanalysis, gender studies and visual studies, and considering femininity as performance, as the American philosopher Judith Butler once put it, Snow shows us what happens when that gender performance is also a professional and creative one. In these cases, the distinction between person and persona is wafer thin, and often the image of a person, a fresh icon, eclipses the person who first created it and whose body remains attached to it.

What happens when a person is trapped by their own creation, or the projections of a vast audience who feel entitled to some kind of psychic ownership? How does it feel to be both revered and punished for being feminine, to be so well known superficially that one is not really known at all? How does it feel to be loved for one’s creation, or an adherence to feminine tropes, only to be harshly rejected for any show of true vulnerability or complexity?

Snow provides a strikingly moving study of how femininity and fame overlap and clash with the people expected to provide the performance, giving insight not only into celebrity culture, but also more everyday experiences of being female, being seen in a certain way but feeling somewhat differently from that. At either end of the spectrum, personal identity becomes threatened by the consuming gaze and expectations of other people, and by their punishment of any behaviour that does not fit the desired narrative; or which does fit the projected character arc, but in so doing requires a morbid sacrifice. Death, it seems, is also a desired narrative. Snow looks at how we treat one another, making deities of our victims (to paraphrase the historian and literary critic René Girard), and her compassion for everyone caught up in this strange cultural phenomenon is touching. These are clever studies, but they are also human interactions with otherwise misunderstood people.

In particular, her essay about Smith and Monroe contains a tender painfulness; as Snow describes Smith’s obsession with her idol, and her wish to become her, she also notes the ways in which her disconnection from herself paves the way for her own self-destruction, mimicking Monroe as if she personified a death wish. She also writes about Britney Spears alongside Aaliyah, carefully describing how each was exploited by the music industry that also celebrated them; Spears was caught between the image of a virginal, wholesome teenager and a burgeoning sex symbol, expected somehow to deliver both performances at once and hide her real self until she was publicly shamed for it.

Later in the book, Snow writes about Amy Winehouse alongside her idol, Billie Holiday, both of whom struggled with heroin addiction, and were treated more harshly for their apparent digressions because they were female rather than male musicians. Snow quotes Nick Cave, himself a onetime heroin addict, who suggested in 2014, three years after Winehouse’s death: “The problem for Amy Winehouse was that she was female. The English press couldn’t handle her. If she’d been a guy, nothing would have happened. But a woman [who does heroin] gets hunted through the village.”

There is no doubt that Winehouse was acting out against the pop star image she had been given (she had been told early on by her label to lose the guitar), and the stifling effects of constant surveillance and harassment by the press, not to mention her painful relationships; her visceral rebellions, of which heroin was just one, perhaps seem to balance out, for a time, the unreal persona with which she was often at odds.

Physical feelings, however dangerous or toxic, were desired as a counterpoint to the unreality of fame and femininity, and the impossible demands they put on the individuals wrapped up in their performance. Winehouse and Holiday, but also Smith, Monroe, Lindsay Lohan, Elizabeth Taylor and others, all sought escape from the jarring effects of fame and femininity as if their dissonance might be cured, however fleetingly. To feel like themselves for a moment, to escape the act they were all caught in, they all felt they had to do things that were perceived as terrible, however damaging the consequences.

In this probing yet compassionate way, Snow identifies the personal conflicts and turmoil behind all the acting out that made these women even more famous. She captures the very human existential crises, the fears they battled, not romanticising or elevating them, but showing how these struggles are relatable and connected to social structures that affect us all.

This is really a book about mortality: all the women Snow writes about wrestled with the death of their identity that creativity and fame brought, and often their own impending deaths. It is also about how we, as viewers, consider the deaths or derailment of people we do not really know, but in whose rise and fall we are nevertheless invested; these parasocial relationships that haunt us and perhaps affect our own behaviour more than we know.

But tenderness persists, and by giving as full a portrait of these lives as is possible, Snow succeeds in illuminating the people behind the personas, and how intricately they were entangled not only in those personas, but those of the figures who inspired them to be stars in the first place. We see how identity is contingent on our ideas of other people, how we all turn our own and other people’s lives into narratives, and how dangerous this can be.

This is a book about femininity and fame, but at its heart it is also about our fear of mortality and invisibility – and how, in this culture, we play out those neuroses using famous women as pawns.

• It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me: On Femininity and Fame, by Philippa Snow, is out on 3 July from Virago, price £20.