Verified by 
Attention
Do You Want to Be Famous?
Fame is scary, with potential for envy, ridicule. or resentment. Is it worth it?
Updated April 7, 2025 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- Fame can be a authentic goal, but it also comes with emotional, intellectual, and social price-tags.
- Being famous does not necessarily define the maker as happy--but it usually means they did something original.
- For women, to become famous is to not only risk failure but to risk success as well. It's complicated.
What’s the difference between fame, celebrity, infamy, and reputation? Fame and infamy are both earned: They arise from something that you’ve done. Celebrity and reputation are things you attract, the way a navy-blue suit attracts lint.
Is fame different for women than it is for men?
Famous women become symbols of social insecurity, embody expectations of what we might become, and model how women should—or should not—behave. There needs to be more examination of the often absurd, sometimes thrilling, and frequently crushing experience of being a woman in the public eye. It’s not enough for a woman simply to be wildly talented or sublimely accomplished, after all. She must be fast in her rise, conspicuous in her ascent, and utterly undeniable in her achievements. (She should probably also be cute, right? It can’t hurt if she’s cute.)
To be a woman in the spotlight is to walk a tightrope, to balance on the narrowest of beams, where every misstep or excess is magnified, and every achievement is fraught with the potential for ridicule or resentment.
I've met some famous people in my time, including Taylor Swift, Jacques Derrida, David Steinberg, Oprah Winfrey, and I grew up next door to Judge Judy before she was "Judge Judy.” I knew her as Judy Blum, the dentist's daughter and the only other girl on the block who went to college.
What's surprising about these folks? They were friendly, curious about other people, and generous with their attention. It's not what made them famous, but these are qualities they all possessed.
I once opened for Joan Rivers. She was coming in from New York to do a fundraiser and more than 3,000 fans were at the Bushnell Center for Performing Arts in Hartford waiting for her to begin. I was there to warm up the crowd—the academic version of a local garage band—and introduce her. As somebody who had spent her life working on women’s comedy, Rivers was one of my idols. I could recite several of her older sets by heart: “I have a friend who’s not good with her medications and confused her birth control pills with her Valium. She has nine kids, but she doesn’t give a shit.”
Eager as I was to meet Rivers and as devoted as I was to her work, I was entirely unprepared for how tiny she was. You could have put that woman in a Happy Meal. Yet she was larger than life—and women’s lives, especially when Rivers first started working in stand-up comedy, needed to be let out a little.
And she was amazing: After listening to my short talk and introduction, she came up to me on stage and said, “I hate you. You’re funnier than I am.”
She said “I hate you” with such natural affection and authentic appreciation that it was like getting a big hug and a bouquet of roses. Joan Rivers announcing “I hate you” made me feel loved.
It's tougher for women to be famous than it is for men.
Having studied women's writing and women's lives for my professional work, as well as to figure out my own existence, I want to state first that there is no such thing as an ordinary woman. Some of us are notorious, daring, inspiring, compelling, foundational, talented, exemplary, ferocious, skilled, courageous, determined, indefatigable, hilarious, and preeminent.
Some are chefs, and some are chief justices; some are nurses and some are librarians; some are singers, dancers, writers, actors, artists, and filmmakers; some are lifesavers, and some are murderers.
My most recent collection, Fast Famous Women, deals with all of these: Seventy-five women wrote short essays on women who achieved fame, some of whom achieved not only admiration but notoriety as well.
Is famous, then, the worst F-word you can call a woman?
Given that women have been advised, for quite some time now, that “the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticizing you,” fame would appear to be anathema. That warning about being too-much discussed is from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, so it falls under the aegis of “quite some time.”
Ladies were never supposed to have their names appear in newspapers except for mentions of their marriages and their dates of death—even having one’s birth mentioned wasn’t entirely ladylike, and then discourteous people could always investigate one’s age, which was also never mentioned. Nothing about women was meant to be mentioned. Women were like vases: silent decorative vessels always waiting to be filled, rather fragile, and placed where they might whimsically distract but never claim attention.
Why do famous women matter? We look towards famous women to see how they did it, and to map their pathways (learning what to do and what to avoid) in the process of discovering our own. Many of the Fast Famous writers express their gratitude to the woman they chose as their focus, saying, in effect, “Without you, I could not have imagined becoming myself,” knowing that without extraordinary human beings to do some things first, or best, few of us would dare to do anything at all.
And as a woman, to become famous for something is to risk not only an eventual failure but to risk success as well. Success can be scary, too, until you become accustomed to it. (After that, however, I hear that success coupled with fame can get all kinds of cozy.)
Because women who achieve public acclaim and fame are necessarily insubordinate, interesting, and unnerving, we know that when talking about women and fame, we are in the very best of bad company.
