The Burning Business of Being Lindsay Lohan

Every week in early 2012, the tabloid cycle produced another set of paparazzi shots of Lindsay Lohan—sunglasses, cigarette, parking lot, repeat. She was twenty-five and had already lived several lifetimes’ worth of public catastrophe: the Mean Girls peak, the DUIs, the ankle bracelet, the rehab stints, the magazine shoots that were meant to signal a comeback but mostly signaled that everyone involved needed the money. The cigarette was constant, appearing in nearly every photograph, held loosely between two fingers like a prop she’d forgotten she was carrying. There was something almost classical about it—a Hollywood ruin, still striking, smoke curling up into the California light while the photographers got their shot and moved on to the next one.