In the weeks after Marilyn Monroe‘s death, Andy Warhol set to work immortalising her. He rendered her face over and over until the image began to disintegrate. She smiles brightly, in lurid colours, then fades to spectral black-and-white. Beauty and disaster are fused forever into that repeating image of her face. It’s a powerful elegy precisely because it’s so complicit, so horribly and fascinatingly cool.
Philippa Snow’s new essay collection, It’s Terrible The Things I Have To Do To Be Me, is 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.
Taking its title from a courtroom lament by Anna Nicole Smith, the book is a study of how fame transforms a woman into an image, and how that image multiplies until there’s nothing left of her. It’s femininity as sacrificial spectacle.
Each of the seven essays in the book pairs two famous women — Marilyn Monroe and Anna Nicole Smith, or Billie Holiday and Amy Winehouse — drawing out eerie synchronicities, parallel trajectories of exploitation, self-invention and, ultimately, obliteration. In her introduction, Snow quotes Andrea Long Chu’s definition of a female as “anyone who has undergone any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another”.
The book’s debt to Chu runs deeper than a single quote; there’s something of her gleefully anarchic spirit in Snow’s approach.
It’s Terrible The Things I Have To Do To Be Me would be fairly dull if it were simply a lament for these damaged, talented women. Snow doesn’t fall into that trap. She is able to be both inside and outside her subjects. At times, she looks at them with real psychological clarity and compassion. Then she steps back, showing us that these are not really women, but cultural hallucinations. They fulfil a fantasy of impossible beauty, and we have to see them punished for it.
Their wreckage amounts to a series of images: weightless, indelible. The blood-splattered ballet pump, the shorn gold locks, the glitter and broken glass. Snow doesn’t deny that her reason for writing is the same reason we read: the sinister pull of the spectacle.
