Overview

*A Book of the Year in the Telegraph and Dazed* '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 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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9780349017716

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Reviews

Turns female celebrity inside-out. Insightful and graceful, and one of the most enjoyable books of the year -- Nicole Flattery, author of Show Them A Good Time An instant classic from the sharpest cultural critic working today. Phillipa Snow is witty, entertaining, and intellectually unmatched, a writer with a singular talent for showing us ourselves in the funhouse mirror of celebrity femininity. It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me is a historical corrective, a loving sendup, and a serious exploration of iconic women too often passed off as unserious. I couldn't put it down. -- Allie Rowbottom, author of Aesthetica Philippa Snow is an incisive composer of criticism whose prose is always both muscular and musical. It's Terrible the Things I Have To Do To Be Me is at once a symphony and a manifesto, a virtuoso performance of feminist criticism. This rigorous, elegiac examination of women destroyed by stardom, desire, and the violent demands of femininity is not to be missed -- Emmeline Clein, author of Dead Weight It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me lives up to its fabulous, improbable name. It's a long-overdue ode to female creative genius, in all its messy, disturbing, ecstatic and wildly entertaining complexity. This book will make you feel things; it's sparkling and dark and utterly addictive. It needed to exist, and Snow has precisely the right blend of narrative elegance and irreverence, coupled with genius-level pop culture knowledge, to bring these stories to life -- Roisin Kiberd, author of The Disconnect A book of essays that deconstructs received notions of femininity, and obliterates those defunct categories of high and low culture by treating its celebrity subjects first and foremost as artists. Written in prose that glimmers with energy, wisdom and delectable turns-of-phrase, It's Terrible The Things I Have to Do To Be Me confirms Philippa Snow's place as the country's most exciting, talented and forward-thinking cultural critic: a writer who has turned criticism into her own form of art -- Ralf Webb, author of Strange Relations Philippa Snow's strength lies not only in her ability to diagnose why these women continue to captivate us, but why they move us; it is this ability, not just to examine her subjects but to weave them so deeply into the very fabric of our emotional lives, that makes her our most vital cultural critic -- Hannah Regel, author of The Last Sane Woman This book takes us into new territories of insight about the punishing price of femininity - that no one can resist and very few can afford - with a wisdom that is as shimmering as it is sharp -- Johanna Hedva, author of How To Tell When We Will Die

Turns female celebrity inside-out. Insightful and graceful, and one of the most enjoyable books of the year -- Nicole Flattery, author of Show Them A Good Time A vodka-and-valium-fuelled drive through the beauty and bloodshed of female celebrity ... Snow's prose is beautiful, white-hot and breathless, like a sports car speeding through the canyon * Observer * An instant classic from the sharpest cultural critic working today. Phillipa Snow is witty, entertaining, and intellectually unmatched, a writer with a singular talent for showing us ourselves in the funhouse mirror of celebrity femininity. It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me is a historical corrective, a loving sendup, and a serious exploration of iconic women too often passed off as unserious. I couldn't put it down. -- Allie Rowbottom, author of Aesthetica Philippa Snow is an incisive composer of criticism whose prose is always both muscular and musical. It's Terrible the Things I Have To Do To Be Me is at once a symphony and a manifesto, a virtuoso performance of feminist criticism. This rigorous, elegiac examination of women destroyed by stardom, desire, and the violent demands of femininity is not to be missed -- Emmeline Clein, author of Dead Weight It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me lives up to its fabulous, improbable name. It's a long-overdue ode to female creative genius, in all its messy, disturbing, ecstatic and wildly entertaining complexity. This book will make you feel things; it's sparkling and dark and utterly addictive. It needed to exist, and Snow has precisely the right blend of narrative elegance and irreverence, coupled with genius-level pop culture knowledge, to bring these stories to life -- Roisin Kiberd, author of The Disconnect A book of essays that deconstructs received notions of femininity, and obliterates those defunct categories of high and low culture by treating its celebrity subjects first and foremost as artists. Written in prose that glimmers with energy, wisdom and delectable turns-of-phrase, It's Terrible The Things I Have to Do To Be Me confirms Philippa Snow's place as the country's most exciting, talented and forward-thinking cultural critic: a writer who has turned criticism into her own form of art -- Ralf Webb, author of Strange Relations Philippa Snow's strength lies not only in her ability to diagnose why these women continue to captivate us, but why they move us; it is this ability, not just to examine her subjects but to weave them so deeply into the very fabric of our emotional lives, that makes her our most vital cultural critic -- Hannah Regel, author of The Last Sane Woman This book takes us into new territories of insight about the punishing price of femininity - that no one can resist and very few can afford - with a wisdom that is as shimmering as it is sharp -- Johanna Hedva, author of How To Tell When We Will Die Threads together fame's complex relationship with femininity, agency, and beauty. With acoustic brilliance, Snow navigates the often-overlooked spiritual and physical labour the most iconic women of our time have endured, exposing something maniacal about our society's celebrity bloodlust - not just with its demands for perfection, but the gleeful schadenfreude that hits the tabloids when these icons inevitably crack. Like the women in these essays, Snow's work is intoxicating and glossily smooth. Put it up on the biggest billboards immediately -- Elle Nash, author of Deliver Me A fascinating, wry and entertaining reclamation of famous women's subjectivity -- Amy Key, author of Arrangements in Blue A brutal and brilliant study of female celebrity ... both a joy to read, fizzing with intelligence, and profoundly dispiriting -- Megan Nolan * Telegraph * Probing yet compassionate ... by giving as full a portrait of these lives as is possible, Snow succeeds in illuminating the people behind the personas * Studio International * A sharp, unflinching look at some of the darkest and most revealing moments in the lives of women in the spotlight ... At once deeply personal and culturally expansive, Snow exposes the unbearable scrutiny women face under the ever-shifting boundaries of surveillance and consent, dissecting how their performance - both public and private - defines them. * AnOther Magazine * A bright but flickering constellation ... The fact that Snow can knit together connective tissue from subjects as overly dissected as Anna Nicole Smith and Marilyn Monroe in a way that makes them feel like you're seeing them for the first time again - naked, but not exploitatively so - is testament to the power of her transcendent writing * Buzz Magazine * 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 * Dazed * What the Marilyn Diptych might have been if Warhol had taken to writing pop culture analysis instead of making prints. It's dark, clever and emotionally complicated, yet at the same time accessible and fun ... a study of how fame transforms a woman into an image, and how that image multiplies until there's nothing left of her * Irish Times * Snow's criticism has a spiritual majesty ... through Snow's humanity, sympathy and crucial insight, every star's story is retold anew * Big Issue * A vivid, often surreal portrait of celebrity womanhood - both tragic and transcendent - and its impact on all who watch * Dazed, 11 of the best new books to read this summer * For its blend of sure-shot observation, insurgent momentum and human sympathy, It's Terrible deserves a place next to other recent essay collections such as Claire Dederer's Monsters and Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror ... Her descriptive powers are world-class ... find someone who writes about anything as well as Philippa Snow writes about Kristen Stewart, and let them loose on this hot mess of a world * Prospect * A biting exploration of fame as performance ... fabulous * Electric Literature *

Author Information

Philippa Snow is a writer based in Norwich. Her reviews and essays have appeared in publications including Artforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, Frieze, the White Review, Vogue, the New Statesman, the TLS, and the New Republic. She was shortlisted for the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and Which As You Know Means Violence was published by Repeater Books in 2022.

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