It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me

*One of the Telegraph's Greatest Books of 2025*

'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.