The thing about being famous is, it’s weird. The only people who get how weird it is are other famous people.

Kidder’s remark captures the isolating paradox of celebrity: fame is a public condition experienced privately, and its most disorienting effects—constant scrutiny, loss of ordinary anonymity, and the distortion of everyday interactions—are hard to convey to those who haven’t lived it. By saying only other famous people understand “how weird it is,” she points to a closed circle of shared experience, where empathy comes less from admiration than from parallel pressures. The quote also hints at the social distance fame creates: it can produce attention without intimacy, recognition without real knowledge, and a sense that one’s life is being continuously interpreted by strangers.