While my husband was gone, I texted a new name to my friend: Anna Nicole Smith. We’d spent the afternoon sending names back and forth. Tonya Harding, Amy Winehouse, Shannen Doherty, Britney Spears. Because the thing was, it wasn’t just Monica Lewinsky. It was all the other women too, who used to be sort-of laughing stocks, and who – you suddenly realised – turned out to be something else entirely. Once you started googling, it was hard to stop. Anna Nicole Smith’s son, Daniel, I now newly knew, died suddenly in her room in hospital, while visiting her and her new baby, his half-sister. The toxicology report suggested he’d ingested some of her methadone prescription, along with other medication. At his funeral, she made them open the coffin and tried to climb inside: she begged them to bury her with him. He was twenty, and she was only thirty-eight. She died of an overdose herself a few months later.

Good one! my friend messaged back. A moment later, she texted: Jade Goody.

Jade Goody! I replied.

My friend sent the hand-painting-its-nails. 54

How could we not have known? I wanted to text, but I couldn’t think of the right emoji to make it funny.

You knew, and didn’t know. Sometimes it seemed that all of my life had been knowing and not-knowing. As if it was a technique rather than a state; a safety mode, a way of coping. There were words for things now that we hadn’t even realised were things, because there were no words for them.

Do you remember, I said when my husband came back, Sinéad O’Connor ripping up the picture of the Pope?

Vaguely, he said. Not really.

Here, look, I said, and I found it on my phone.

She’d been performing on the American programme Saturday Night Live. In rehearsal, she’d held up a picture of orphaned children. We have confidence in the victory of good over evil. But when she did it live, the picture was of Pope John Paul II and she ripped it up, once, twice, three times, and scattered the pieces. Fight the real enemy, she said, looking straight at the camera. The clip ended with her taking off her headset and blowing out the church pillar candles on the table beside her.

We watched the twenty-nine seconds again, and then again. Every time, you felt something creeping up and down your spine.

Bloody hell, my husband said.

I can’t believe you don’t remember that, I said. Maybe it wasn’t such a big deal in England.

I took my phone back and leaned against his shoulder.

We would have been eleven at the time, I said. 55

I remembered the shockwaves. One cardinal, in an interview on TV, said she was using voodoo or ‘sympathetic magic’ in an attempt to injure the Pope.

The cigar, my husband said, after a bit.

The what?