This book's focus on nine female celebrities that were the subject of the press's toxic treatment presents fascinating commentary about celebrity culture in the aughts. Having lived through many of these moments, it was interesting to revisit them with a bit more nuanced/ improved cultural relationship to public figures. The book extends its focus to how gender and cultural understanding of gender/ womanhood, which I very much appreciated.

I enjoyed some aspects of this book and other aspects I felt were overwritten. I've also heard lots of critiques about this writer generally lately, so I don't know that I will continue reading from her.

Thank you NetGalley and ABRAMS for the ARC! Conceptually I was very excited for this read but it didn’t quite pull the content together to make it feel connected and engaging. I’m sure many readers will enjoy it though - it was insightful and touched on a topic we are all curious to dig deeper into.

I was furious for most of this book BUT it was fascinated how misogyny and violence against women are embedded into our society. I think this would be an excellent book club book to discuss ways how even women participate in continuing harmful narratives. The major takeaway is no one is quite safe if you identify as a woman.

While some parts of this book were really interesting, I felt like the overall message was very repetitive.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an advance copy in exchange for honest feedback. After a couple of chapters, finding the constant insistence on deadnaming suspicious, I googled and confirmed, this was written by a TERF. There were points I agree with, but the refusal to call out transphobia (particularly in the chapters about Chyna) were telling, as was the strange omission of queer identities when those came up (Lindsay, Angelina), particularly given that all the other significant romantic relationships were listed out and that said queer identities would certainly have an impact on perception of these women.

I loved this collection of narratives about pop culture in the 90s/2000s. It’s horrible how these women were treated by the media. I remember them all growing up. Great look into this time period.

I LOVED THIS. If you, like me, followed tabloids or celebrities in the aughts then this is a must read. Ditum's analysis and discussion is a great way to re-engage these memories, tropes, travesties, and events.

A more Indepth review is on my Goodreads but I really liked this one. It reminded me of something you'd read if you were taking a class about the celebrity culture of the 2000s to study.

Toxic was a really interesting deep dive into 2000s tabloid culture and how various female celebrities were treated. I appreciated the various essays and think this author is part of a larger conversation about how we talk about and represent women in the media.

An interesting dive into the early 2000s and how life was toxic for some of the famous females of that time. I did a lot of frowning and head shaking throughout this story. The double standards are just unreal sometimes.
I’m glad that for most of these women life has gotten better and that for the others they are at rest now.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy to review. Going through the late 1990s to mid 2000s, Ditum uses high profile celebrity women to share the ways publicity, misogyny, and racism shaped how culture treated these women. A mix of darned if you do darned if you don't, she highlights the tightrope women have had to walk in the public sphere and the beginnings of this being to be examined. I was disappointed she only had one black woman (she briefly mentions the trouble of labeling someone as white in another chapter) and she also at times went of topic in later chapters. All in all a good read.

Oh wow, a book that brings you back to all the terrible times of the 2000s. Toxic is a perfect title for that decade. This was a deep dive into the nine most prominent female celebrities of that decade and how the media failed them. Some of the chapters were messy and all over the place.

I will preface this review by saying I would not consider myself a non-fiction fan, so my words should be taken with that bias. However, I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed this one! I found it to be a quick read for being non-fiction and incredibly well-researched and supported. As a millennial who grew up in the late 90s and early aughts, the women written about in this book were the women in the posters on my bedroom door and always on my radio and/or television. It was nice to see them given a redemptive arc as they certainly did not deserve the vilification the media gave them throughout my youth.

Unfortunately, I found the author to be a bit repetitive and I think the book could've been organized in a better way to draw parallels and highlight common themes in the stories of these celebrities. If Ditum had a better editor, I think this book could've been cut down by a third. I also felt like Ditum's stance on how these women were portrayed and victimized wavered far too often and it was hard to understand the point the author was trying to get across. Most of the time it felt like Ditum was a staunch feminist but then she'd write something that felt riddled with shame and judgment. As a result, it made it difficult to take her seriously and worked to delegitimize her point of view.

All in all, I'd give this one 3.5 stars - it was interesting and engaging but perhaps a hair too long!

This book had an interesting premise but ultimately it didn't hold my interest. Would still be interested to see what other nonfiction titles this author will produce in the future though.

Would recommend for fans of…
💫 Britney’s memoir
💫 The Kardashians
💫 Paris in Love

I’ve been interested in celebrity culture and gossip for as long as I can remember. I was the child that would absorb ALL of the tabloid headlines in line at the grocery store, and I even used to check out People and US Weekly from the library. But as the years have passed, I (along with much of society) have started to reflect on the tabloid culture of the early 2000s and how so much of it was just wrong.

That is where Toxic comes in, looking at how nine different women — ranging from Janet Jackson to Lindsay Lohan — were portrayed and mistreated by the media in that era.

I think this book was well intentioned, but in execution it missed the mark. The chapters are unfocused and tangential, and often choose to focus on the people and institutions that brought these women down, rather than keeping the focus on the women themselves. There’s also not a lot of new information introduced, which would be fine if the essays themselves offered interesting reflections (which unfortunately, they don’t).

My opinion would be to skip this book, unless you missed the early 2000s and are looking for a recap. Otherwise, your time is better spent reading and watching the stories of these women in their own words.

Toxic is out now. Thanks to Abrams and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

It seems like books exploring the culture of the early aughts are having a moment. Ditum explores the trials of female celebrity through nine household names: Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Aaliyah, Janet, Amy, Kim, Chyna, and Jen. Even though I was on the younger side, I was still part of the public that was judging the "party girls" and talking about the Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction" and constantly picking sides in any celebrity feud that pitted women against one another. Ditum traces the general treatment of women during this time by the media and the public, in the years where the Internet came in and changed everything and before there was a Me Too movement to protest the release of sex tapes and leaked photos. While each woman's story was not the same, it's interesting to see how, when put together, the patterns of toxicity emerge, leaving me wishing we had all been just a little bit better and a little bit kinder.

There were a few points where the chapters veered to focus on the men in these stories and though the stories couldn't be told without including them, I could have done with a little less time spent on R. Kelly and Justin Timberlake, etc., but overall this is a solid read for anyone interested in a critical look back at a time in the not too distant history of celebrity.

Toxic media culture in the early 2000s has been a popular topic of late, and it’s an interesting one if you’re bringing something new to the discussion with what you write.

If you haven’t read a lot of recent criticism of the topic then this book is a fine catch-all, but if you’ve delved into the subject before, this book doesn’t really express anything new, and it doesn’t necessarily do a better job of expressing what’s already out there.

It’s also a bit of a one-dimensional look at the issue, and though the author says this is what she’s trying not to do, she retroactively applies that values of the current era to a past era without a lot of nuance.

The subjects here are interestingly selected lot, some more sympathetic than others and some a better fit for the topic than others. I’ll give the author credit for including Chyna, who comes up less often than the others in these conversations and whose story was less familiar to me because I don’t follow wrestling. I’m not sure Aaliyah made sense as a subject here, and the inclusion of Kim Kardashian is a problem in a number of different ways.

But the rest, at least, are great examples of what happened during this era, and if you haven’t done a lot of examination of the subject, this is an adequate place to start, though I would encourage readers to seek out content from creators with a more nuanced perspective on the topic. Kate Kennedy’s book and podcast come to mind, as does Natasha Lasky’s 33 1/3 book on Britney Spears’ Blackout.

In "Toxic," Ditum invites readers to revisit a time before the era of second chances and redemption arcs, providing a thought-provoking examination of how the cultural events of that decade continue to influence our present-day understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. A compelling read that offers both insight and reflection on the enduring effects of a truly toxic period in celebrity culture.

I was really excited to read this book when it came up as an option on NetGalley. The topic seemed interesting and I am not ashamed to say that I enjoy following current events in Hollywood. That being said, I really struggled to engage with the book. I skipped around a bit to read things that I was interested in, but as a whole work, I was not the biggest fan.