No one writes about fame like Philippa Snow

While finishing Philippa Snow’s upcoming book, It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me – a series of essays about misunderstood, maligned, near-mythical famous women – I realised I’m not sure if I’ve ever read so much of a non-fiction writer’s work while knowing so little about them.

You won’t find out much about Snow’s personal life through her work, which is a choice she’s made, by her own description, very purposefully. Perhaps this makes sense: she has a long-standing interest in writing about the horrors and indignities of fame, and so my first thought, of course, was that a writer who’s immersed herself in these themes for a decade or so might understandably develop a resistance to exhibiting herself on the page.

When I interviewed Snow, she described this dynamic with a subtle inversion of agency: ​“Some of my interest in the mechanics of fame has to spring from the fact that to me, it seems like a nightmare.” She’s interested in dissecting fame in part because she fears it, rather than the other way around. With this in mind, her criticism is inherently personal, if sneakily so: by drawing from her deepest-held convictions without dwelling on her own history, it reveals without revealing.

Alongside It’s Terrible… Snow has an essay collection of previously published work, Snow Business, available now via subscription at ISOLARII, its publisher. Both books deal extensively with femininity, fame, artifice, violence, and surveillance, often by exploring the lives of women the world has loved and hated in equal measure.

Both of these projects are different from the discourse that has dogged stars like Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson over the last few years. For one thing, Snow has a refreshing disinterest in traditional victimhood narratives; for another, her essays have an intellectual seriousness and style that makes them art objects in themselves. She has a canny ability to find seemingly disparate pieces of information and tie them together in rhetorical harmony, collecting obscure details about her subjects and fitting them like puzzle pieces into the structure of her argument.

Reading her essays is thrilling, like watching a professional athlete land a triple axel or stick a landing on the mat. She pulls it off through obsessive, meticulous research – Snow once watched a full decade’s worth of Keeping Up With the Kardashians for a single essay. You’ll end up believing, as she does, that these women’s lives deserve to be read carefully and taken seriously.

I briefly considered trying to give Snow herself the Philippa Snow treatment in this introduction. I imagined combing through archived interviews, podcast appearances, old reviews, Reddit comments about her work, pieces of media theory, old films, all of it, until I found the right wires to spark together some narrative electricity.

In the end, though, I decide against it: not only because I certainly wouldn’t be as good at it as she is, or because I get the sense that she wouldn’t like it, but most of all, because the best way to understand Snow is to read her criticism. It’s all there, if you pay attention.

The first thing that I thought about when I was reading Snow Business – a retrospective collection of the past five years of your work – was that I try to think about my recent work as little as possible! What was it like to look back at and curate a collection of your past work? Was it strange?

Well, I’m 37 and I’ve been publishing things since I was about 20, so I’ve been doing it for a long time. A lot of early stuff from my twenties I would not want to have to reread – you would probably have to make me do it at gunpoint. I didn’t do an English degree; I went to art school instead. I kind of learned on the job, which means that when I look at much older pieces now, the fixations are the same, but I can see myself cycle stylistically through a couple of different phases. There was a weird period where I wrote in very short sentences, like I thought I was fucking Hemingway or something, which I think was me trying to be sort of declarative. So the last five years, in comparison, it’s not so bad to revisit them. I’d kind of cemented my writing style by that point because I’d had so much practice.

Totally. I’m in my early twenties and I also didn’t have a traditional journalism or writing education, so I’m just learning all the time. I start reading Vivian Gornick and then suddenly all my pieces kind of sound like Vivian Gornick.

I don’t know what it’s like for someone of your age, but every millennial woman who writes essays seemed to have a Didion phase.

When I read some of my stuff from when I was 19 or 20, I hadn’t really read that much Didion yet, but I look back and read it like, ​“this is such a Didion pastiche, where was I getting this from?” And I realised that I was reading the millennial women who were doing the Didion pastiches.

God, that’s amazing. Like second-hand smoke giving you cancer. I should say, though, I still love Didion – I feel terrible that I just compared her influence to cancer…

There are worse people to do pastiches of, at the end of the day. You said that you’ve had these specific fixations over time, and I’m curious to hear what you think those are…

I was a teenager in the 2000s, around the introduction of very extreme paparazzi surveillance. We could suddenly look at women who were famous all the time, completely without their consent. That idea of expanded surveillance, I think, is something that’s been a huge influence: the female celebrity as this object that is deified and dissected at the same time. And the separation of the self and the body, which I think must be something that you experience at such an extreme level as a woman who is famous.

It’s interesting that you talk about the paparazzi surveillance culture of the early 2000s. I think of surveillance culture now as widespread institutional and state surveillance, coupled with self-surveillance. I feel like the famous women of today are almost more likely to be the person who’s setting up the tripod to show you a 24-hour window into their lives. Today, fame is so democratised. There are elements of that 2000s surveillance culture that any teenage girl with an internet connection can recreate for herself.

You’re right about this idea of [self-surveillance and social media] democratising the design of one’s image, and that’s something I write about as well. It allows famous people to present themselves exactly as they would like to be seen by the public, and it gives the rest of us that ​“power”, in very cautious quotation marks. Britney Spears is actually an intriguing example of this, because there’ve been quite a few instances where she has disliked paparazzi photos, and then subsequently posted her own photos as a corrective. That’s fascinating because you’re seeing those two kinds of fame interact with each other: the kind that she was completely immersed in when she was young, and then the kind that she has only just been given access to without being under a conservatorship. She’s now trying to figure that out for herself. It’s interesting to see famous people who have had to adapt between those two modes.

It’s even really interesting to see how Britney engages with social media versus Paris Hilton, for example. Paris has so effectively adapted to the times. She’s doing her direct-to-Instagram version of reality TV, while also appearing sort of completely physically unchanging in a way that you’ve written about, too.

I think I’ve tried to avoid using this quote in anything recently – I’ve used it too much because it was so perfect. But Paris said once in an interview in the 2000s, ​“people like me because I’m sexy but not sexual.” And I just thought that was one of the most astute things I’ve ever read a celebrity saying about themselves.

Even she understands that her power is in being an image without action. Something that I noticed that I really appreciated is that both of your new books are relatively low on explicit personal detail. I came away from it feeling like I knew a lot about you because criticism is a deeply personal thing. But I think a lot of ink has been spilled about there being pressure for women writers to draw repeatedly from the personal or to share intimate details about their lives. I was wondering what you think about that pressure. Is [not sharing much about yourself] a conscious choice?

It’s a very conscious choice! I don’t want that much to be known about me, because unless it plays directly into the work, I don’t think it’s particularly relevant. It’s occurred to me that some of my interest in the mechanics of fame has to spring from the fact that to me, it seems like a nightmare. That kind of visibility is something I could never imagine wanting for myself, and the idea that so many people do want it is all the more interesting to me because of that.

An editor said to me once a few years ago, very offhandedly, ​“I think it’s interesting that you write about famous women as a way of obliquely writing about yourself.” I’d never thought about that until he said it, but it’s true on some level. There’s a personal investment there for me – I think that’s clear from the way that I write about these things. And I think the reader knowing how I feel is more important to me than them knowing what I look like, or what my relationship with my parents is like, or whatever. I lived through the personal essay boom, where people were being paid $100 to talk about having fucked their dad, and those people were usually women. There are women, of course, who do write fantastically about their own lives, and I enjoy reading them. But it’s not something that I generally do myself.

It does feel like there’s some sort of external pressure to make yourself into a persona, into an image as a woman writer, to have some legible ​“self” that people can invest in through the work. But criticism is so intimate, reading about the things that someone is obsessed with and fixated on. And sometimes that’s a way to get even more intimate than telling a straightforward story about how you fucked your dad.

Yeah, absolutely. For example, I wrote a negative review of The Substance last year. It was a film that a lot of people that I knew really liked, but which I didn’t like it at all, to the point where I was quite angry when I wrote the review. And now that I think about it with some distance, it’s clear to me that – sorry, this is quite intense – the anger was because my mother was dying at the time. Not that long before the film came out, we had realised that things had got a lot worse with her cancer, and she was visibly looking more like a sick person. I think there was something about the way that the film presented a woman ageing and degrading as this kind of grotesque and monstrous thing that I had taken umbrage to because of that, without even really realising it. I think all criticism is to some degree informed by how you are feeling at the time when you write it, whether you realise that or not. You are always absorbing a work of art from and within the context of your own experiences. There are also things that I’ve disclosed through writing about other, less personal subjects in the past, that I would never have approached without that protective layer of writing about a work of art instead of my own life.

Criticism can sometimes feel more personal than a personal essay. Something I think about in my own work that I was curious to ask you is: why write about famous women? I think some people have this feeling of, ​“well, I’m a normal person. I have no wealth and no status. Why should the lives of celebrities be at all applicable to my own life?” What that editor said to you – ​“you’re writing about famous women as a way to write about yourself” – maybe that’s part of the value of celebrity. They are refractors or reflectors that I can look at and feel like I’m understanding parts of myself through them.

Yeah, as I talk about in the introduction to It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me. I’m interested in this idea of famous woman as a metonym for womanhood – a huge, exploded outwards version of the experiences that we all have. I think how we treat women in the public eye is often an indicator of how culture and society treat women in general. And a lot of the same structures, a lot of the same ideas about beauty and image, are also applicable to average women in a smaller way. Maybe just as the reader can glean things about me from reading the way that I write about other women, I learn things about my place in the world by writing that material.

I think that’s what a lot of these women do for a lot of people. One of my friends once described being famous as this sort of Christlike act of self-sacrifice, where you hitch yourself up on this cross so that people can, first of all, be entertained, but I think also so they can reach a cathartic self-understanding.

Well, there’s a reason that so many women of my age are so obsessed with Britney Spears shaving her head. Visually it’s this almost kind of martyr, Joan of Arc image, as I write in the book. And her saying ​“I’m tired of people touching me”? I think all women have had that feeling, even if it’s not literal, of wanting the hands of other people off your body, or out of your brain.

I was thinking this afternoon about the through-line in all of my books: going from writing about extreme performance art and personal injury [in 2022’s Which As You Know Means Violence], to writing about celebrity culture. What I’m interested in are extreme characters. When I’m writing about famous women, I like the jagged, ugly, weird sort of stuff about them. I feel a lot of love for that. People often say, oh, why hasn’t Lindsay Lohan gone through the Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson kind of redemption arc, rooted in a documentary that’s basically a sort of formalised apology from the media? And I think it’s because she was kind of a bitch. I say that lovingly! Nobody says ​“Lindsay Lohan was lovely. She was wonderful to work with.” And I’m fine with that! I think she was a prodigiously talented person who also, at one time, had a hard edge to her as a performer and a star that I enjoyed. And God, there are so many famous men who are talented and also assholes.

I feel exactly the same way. Pamela was smart and everyone has good things to say about her, and Britney was such a sweet girl. I also think that you shouldn’t have to be smart or kind in order to justify an apology, or to deserve not to be treated that way.

I mean, also, the thing that makes Pamela Anderson smart is not just the fact that she’s read Djuna Barnes, it’s that she made Pamela Anderson. That’s a different kind of intelligence, and I have respect for that. When I’m writing about these women, I’m often writing about terrible stuff that happened to them, but I don’t want us to pretend that they’re always nice, or that they’re always sweet. Women shouldn’t have to be perfect victims in order for us to recognise that they’ve been treated very badly.

Want more? We thought so. This way to purchase Snow Business, published by ISOLARII, and this way for It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me