The fad began with a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in New York City on a beautiful day last month. Thousands of people came and caused a ruckus. At least one of the Timothées was among the four people arrested by New York City police. Eventually, the real Timothée Chalamet showed up to take pictures with fans. The event, which was organized by a popular YouTuber who had recently received some attention for eating a tub of cheeseballs in a public park, captured lightning in a bottle. It didn’t even matter that the winner didn’t look much like the actor, or that the prize was only $50.

In the weeks since, similar look-alike contests have sprung up all over the country, organized by different people for their own strange reasons. There was a Zayn Malik look-alike contest in Brooklyn, a Dev Patel look-alike contest in San Francisco, and a particularly rowdy Jeremy Allen White look-alike contest in Chicago. Harry Styles look-alikes gathered in London, Paul Mescal look-alikes in Dublin. Zendaya look-alikes competed in Oakland, and a “Zendaya’s two co-stars from Challengers” lookalike contest will be held in Los Angeles on Sunday. As I write this, I have been alerted to plans for a Jack Schlossberg look-alike contest to be held in Washington, D.C., the same day. (Schlossberg is John F. Kennedy’s only grandson; he both works at Vogue and was also profiled by Vogue this year.)

These contests evidently provide some thrill that people are finding irresistible at this specific moment in time. What is it? The chance to win some viral fame or even just positive online attention is surely part of it, but those returns are diminishing. The more contests there are, the less novel each one is, and the less likely it is to be worth the hassle. That Chalamet showed up to his look-alike contest was magic—he’s also the only celebrity to attend one of these contests so far. Yet the contests continue.

Celebrities have a mystical quality that’s undeniable, and it is okay to want to be in touch with the sublime. Still, some observers sense something a bit sinister behind the playfulness of contest after contest, advertised with poster after poster on telephone pole after telephone pole. The playwright Jeremy O. Harris wrote on X that the contests are “Great Depression era coded,”  seeming to note desperation and a certain manic optimism in these events. The comparison is not quite right—although the people at these contests may not all have jobs, they don’t seem to be starving (one of the contests promised only two packs of cigarettes and a MetroCard as a prize)—but I understand what he’s getting at. Clearly, the look-alike competitions do not exist in a vacuum.

The startling multiplication of the contests reminds me of the summer of 2020, when otherwise rational-seeming people suggested that the FBI was planting caches of fireworks in various American cities as part of a convoluted psyop. There were just too many fireworks going off for anything else to make sense! So people said. With hindsight, it’s easy to recognize that theory as an expression of extreme anxiety brought on by the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. At the time, some were also feeling heightened distrust of law enforcement, which had in some places reacted to Black Lives Matter protests with violence.

Today’s internet-y stunts are just silly events, but people are looking for greater meaning in them. Over the past few weeks, although some have grown a bit weary of the contests, a consensus has also formed that they are net good because they are bringing people out of their house and into “third spaces” (public parks) and fraternity (“THE PEOPLE LONG FOR COMMUNITY”). This too carries a whiff of desperation, as though people are intentionally putting on a brave face and shoving forward symbols of our collective creativity and togetherness.

I think the reason is obvious. The look-alike contests, notably, started at the end of October. The first one took place on the same day as a Donald Trump campaign event at Madison Square Garden, which featured many gleefully racist speeches and was reasonably compared by many to a Nazi rally. The photos from the contests maybe serve as small reassurance that cities, many of which shifted dramatically rightward in the recent presidential election, are still the places that we want to believe they are—the closest approximation of America’s utopian experiment, where people of all different origins and experiences live together in relative peace and harmony and, importantly, good fun. At least most of the time.

File this under something that should have been self-evident: When it came time for the artist known as Cher to finish her memoir, she discovered she had too much material. Where to even begin? Decades before Madonna had reinventions and Taylor Swift had eras, Cher had comebacks—triumphs over decline in which she’d reemerge stronger, shinier, and more resolute than ever. “It’s a thousand times harder to come back than to become,” she writes in the first volume of her autobiography, titled—naturally—Cher. And yet something in her soul seems to always relish the challenge. A walking, singing eye roll, Cher has never met an obstacle without theatrically raising a middle finger. Consider the gown she wore to present at the Academy Awards in 1986 after having been snubbed for her performance in Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask: the cobwebbed, midsection-baring, black sequined supervillainess outfit that became known as her fuck the Oscars dress. Radiantly moody, she glowered her way right into awards-show history.

But much of that later timeline is for the second volume, supposedly arriving next year. Cher, which documents the four decades between her birth, in 1946, and the start of her serious acting career, in 1980, is concerned with the essentials: where she came from, who she is, all the incidents that helped her become one of music’s most indelible mononyms. I guarantee that, as you read, you’ll be able to conjure the sound of her voice in your mind, velvety and sonorous. (“You couldn't tell who was singing the baritone parts,” The New York Times noted in 1988 about “I Got You, Babe,” her duet with Sonny Bono, “but you had the disturbing feeling that it probably wasn't Sonny.”) And likely her face, too: her doll-like features, sphinxlike smile, and black, black hair. More than anything, though, Cher has come to stand for a brassy, strutting kind of survival over the years, and on this front, her memoir is awash in insight and rich in details.

Cher is a bracing read, peppered with caustic quips and self-effacing anecdotes, but fundamentally frank. This, you might agree, is no moment for nostalgia. (She does not—forgive the cheap gag—actually want to turn back time.) “Ours was a sad, strange story of Southern folk coming from nothing and carving out a life after the Great Depression,” Cher writes. “It wasn’t pretty and it was never easy … Resilience is in my DNA.” Her grandmother was 12 years old when she became pregnant with Cher’s mother, Jackie Jean; her grandfather Roy was a baker’s assistant turned bootlegger who beat his new wife, made his daughter sing for pennies on top of the bars he’d drink at, and once tried to murder both his children by leaving the gas stove on. For much of Cher’s infancy—she was born Cheryl Sarkisian but changed her name in 1978—she was raised by nuns, after her father abandoned her 20-year-old mother. Later, her mother, who had a muted acting career, cycled through seven or eight husbands and two illegal abortions that almost killed her. Although Jackie was a talented performer and luminously beautiful, “my mom missed out on several major acting roles because she refused to sleep with men who promised her a break,” Cher notes. The stepfather who was kindest to young Cher was also a nasty drunk, to the point where, even now, “I still can’t stand the sound of a belt coming out of pant loops.”

From early childhood, Cher was a dynamo—singing perpetually into a hairbrush, dancing around the house, and peeing her pants during a screening of Dumbo rather than miss any of the movie. She dreamed of being a star, and, less conventionally, of discovering a cure for polio. (“When Jonas Salk invented a vaccine, I was so pissed off,” she writes.) Because of her mother’s erratic relationships, she moved constantly, all over the country. By 15, she was living in Los Angeles, where she recounts being leered at by Telly Savalas in a photographer’s studio and spending a wild night or two with Warren Beatty. At 16, she met the man who’d become her partner in all senses of the word: a divorced, charming, slightly squirelly 27-year-old named Sonny Bono. “He liked that I was quirky and nonjudgmental,” Cher writes. “I liked that he was funny and different. He was a grown-up without being too grown up, and I was a sixteen-year-old lying about my age.” Their relationship was platonic at first—when she found herself homeless, she moved in with him, the pair sleeping in twin beds next to each other like characters in a 1950s sitcom. One day, he kissed her, and that was that.

If Cher’s early life is a Steinbeckian saga of grim endurance, her life with Bono is a volatile scrapbook of life in 20th-century entertainment. Thanks to Bono’s connections with Phil Spector, she became a singer, performing backing vocals on the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” When Cher and Bono formed a duo and became wildly famous in 1965 with “I Got You, Babe,” the American musical establishment initially deemed her too outré in her bell bottoms and furs, and then—as the sexual revolution and rock music caught fire—too square. In her first flush of fame, the recently widowed Jackie Kennedy requested that Sonny & Cher perform for a private dinner party in New York. The fashion editor Diana Vreeland had Cher photographed for Vogue. At a party in his hotel suite, Salvador Dalí explained to her that an ornamental fish she was admiring was actually a vibrator. (“I couldn’t drop that fish fast enough.”) Having entrusted all the financial details of their partnership to Bono, she was stunned when he revealed that they owed hundreds of thousands in back taxes, right as their musical success was stalling.

[Read: What Madonna knows]

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were,” Marcel Proust declared in In Search of Lost Time. Show-business memoirs can be gritty—Al Pacino’s Sonny Boy recounts a similarly bleak childhood—but I’m hard pressed to think of another celebrity author so insistent on dispensing with rose-tinted reminiscences. Cher wants you to know that for most people—and absolutely for most women—the 20th century was no cakewalk. She loved Bono, and is the first to admit how enchanting their dynamic could be. But the partner she describes was controlling, vengeful (he reportedly burned her tennis clothes after he saw her talking to another man), and shockingly callous. When she left him, she discovered that her contract was one of “involuntary servitude”—he owned 95 percent of a company called Cher Enterprises, of which she was an employee who never received a paycheck. (His lawyer owned the other 5 percent.) Their divorce was finalized in 1975, a year or so after women were granted the right to apply for credit cards in their own names.

Promoting her book, Cher told CBS Sunday Morning, “I didn’t want to give information, ’cause you could go to Wikipedia [for that]. I just wanted to tell stories.” And she does, but in a form that can’t help doubling as a broader history—an account of all the things women have suffered through (casting couches, financial ruin, humiliating public scrutiny) and fought for (authority over their own bodies). Unlike her mother, Cher was, via carefully coded language, offered a legal abortion in her doctor’s office in 1975, during a period when her life was in flux. (Her second husband, the musician Gregory Allman, was addicted to heroin and had deserted her; she was about to return to work on her CBS variety show, also titled Cher.) “I needed to be at work on Monday,” she remembers. “I needed to be singing and dancing. I had a child, mother, and sister to take care of. I knew I had to make a choice, and I knew what it was. It made it harder that I didn’t have Gregory to talk to about it, but I made my decision and I was so grateful to my doctor’s compassion for giving me one.” (Cher and Bono's son, Chaz Bono, had been born in 1969. By 1976, Cher and Allman had reconciled, and Cher gave birth to Elijah Blue Allman.)

Gratitude. Compassion. Choice. What is resilience reliant on if not all three? We have to wait for book two for Cher’s account of her ups and downs in the ’80s and ’90s—her new acting career, her Best Actress Oscar for Moonstruck, her turn to infomercials for income after a severe bout of chronic fatigue syndrome, her auto-tuned path with “Believe” to one of the best-selling pop singles of all time. But in Cher, she offers a persuasive, wry, rousing account of what made her, and what she was able to make in turn. “I’ve always thought that whether you get a break or not is purely down to luck,” she writes, adding, “These were the key moments that changed my luck.” But that read of things understates her sheer force of will—her outright refusal, as with the Oscars dress, to ever be counted out.