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 - Telegraph
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Turns female celebrity inside-out. Insightful and graceful, and one of the most enjoyable books of the year
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A fascinating, wry and entertaining reclamation of famous women's subjectivity
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An instant classic from the sharpest cultural critic working today. I couldn't put it down
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Sharp, unflinching, provocative - AnOther Magazine
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Its 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 - Prospect
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At once a symphony and a manifesto, a virtuoso performance of feminist criticism ... not to be missed
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This book will make you feel things; it's sparkling and dark and utterly addictive. It needed to exist
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