I heard about Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties by Sarah Ditum before it came out and I listened to it earlier this year on audiobook, as a woman who came of age in the nineties, a very long time before Me Too, at a toxic time, when what was and wasn’t acceptable was very different.

The author charts the stories of nine famous women, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Aaliyah Haughton, Janet Jackson, Amy Winehouse, Kim Kardashian, Lindsay Lohan, Chyna and Jennifer Aniston, their rise to fame and how the media built them up and then did their very best to tear them down. The consequences for the individual womens’ careers, mental health and sometimes actual lives is clinically laid bare.

To be honest, as not much of a gossip follower, social media user, or reader of tabloids, I didn’t know most of these stories at all, beyond Britney, Jen and Amy, and in fact I didn’t know who many of these women even were, but the author’s deep-dives into how each was treated was horrifying and served well to paint a picture of what it meant to be a woman in the media at this time and the impact the way they were treated had on the rest of us. Sobering reading.