Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face,’ wrote John Updike in Self-Consciousness, a metaphor which gives a startling tilt to our assumptions about fame and its consequences. We might then view celebrtiy as affliction.

Think of it, after years of living at the point of a flash-gun, of being the subect of the 'show biz' writers, ' endeavouing to get down whippet lean sentences they come up invariably with soporific word-play great fogs of verbiage which arrives on people's breakfast table as clotted prose about you. Even when you 'retire' your fate is to be the carrion of memorabilia, cranks and monomaniac collectors, the obsessives who pay homage to your 'life' by hunting down and hoarding the debris in your dusbins.