Press Reviews

• Nicole Flattery, author of Show Them A Good Time

  Turns female celebrity inside-out. Insightful and graceful, and one of the most enjoyable books of the year

• Allie Rowbottom, author of Aesthetica

  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.

• Emmeline Clein, author of Dead Weight

  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

• Roisin Kiberd, author of The Disconnect

  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

• Ralf Webb, author of Strange Relations

  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

• Hannah Regel, author of The Last Sane Woman

  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

• Johanna Hedva, author of How To Tell When We Will Die

  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

• Elle Nash, author of Deliver Me

  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

• Amy Key, author of Arrangements in Blue

  A fascinating, wry and entertaining reclamation of famous women's subjectivity

• Megan Nolan

  Telegraph

  A brutal and brilliant study of female celebrity ... both a joy to read, fizzing with intelligence, and profoundly dispiriting

• Studio International

  Probing yet compassionate ... by giving as full a portrait of these lives as is possible, Snow succeeds in illuminating the people behind the personas

• AnOther Magazine

  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.

• Buzz 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

• Dazed

  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

• Irish Times

  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

• Big Issue

  Snow's criticism has a spiritual majesty ... through Snow's humanity, sympathy and crucial insight, every star's story is retold anew

• Dazed, 11 of the best new books to read this summer

  A vivid, often surreal portrait of celebrity womanhood - both tragic and transcendent - and its impact on all who watch

• Observer

  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

• Prospect

  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