This article originally appeared on Mia Freedman's Substack, Babble . You can subscribe here .

Two very famous American women are going through hell right now and there's no instruction manual for how to do it the 'right' way.

Something Princess Catherine has already discovered.

In February, the night before Today Show host, Savannah Guthrie was due to fly to Milan to host the Olympics for NBC, her 84-year-old mother, Nancy, was taken from her home by a masked man with a handgun and a black backpack.

Watch: The abduction of Nancy Guthrie. Post continues below.

Five months later, unbelievably, Nancy Guthrie is still missing. There have been some ransom notes — fake, all of them, the FBI now says. There was a letter to NBC, claiming Nancy had died. There's a US$1.2 million reward sitting there, unclaimed.

And roughly 64 days after her mum vanished, Savannah Guthrie got back to work. She put on a bright yellow jacket – the colour that has come to symbolise missing people – and went back to talking to America about the news, like she had every weekday at 7am for years.

Last week, on the other side of the internet where creators live, model Nara Smith posted too. If you don't know Nara — she's the 24-year-old model turned TikTok phenomenon who makes bubble gum and cheese and Froot Loops from scratch, in full glam, wearing ball gowns, for her model husband and their four tiny children.

It's odd and camp and a kind of ASMR and like if Ballerina Farm had a baby with a couture runway show. Incredibly aesthetic. Deeply controlled. The whole appeal is that nothing is ever out of place.

But then.

In the kind of emotional, talking-to-camera video that's so common online but that Nara herself would never normally post, she shared that her two-year-old daughter, Whimsy, was diagnosed with cancer late last year.

She revealed that she'd been a little quieter than usual these past months, taking care of her newborn while her family did whatever they could to meet this terrible moment.

Now Whimsy has come through her first major phase of chemo. And Nara — who has built an empire on letting millions of strangers watch her serene, beautiful life — decided she was ready to tell the story herself, on her own terms.

Two very famous women, admired and beloved in their own ways, both trying to navigate their way through unimaginable distress and fear and grief and stress of the private and the public smashing together in the most shocking ways.

So what do you actually do? I don't have a tidy answer and I'm suspicious of anyone who does. But watching these two women — one who controlled the reveal, one who's rationing herself out in yellow to silently acknowledge her missing mum, one morning at a time — I think the answer they've both landed on is the same, even though it looks nothing alike from the outside. They decided how much. They decided when. They took the one thing fame tries to take from you, which is the right to keep something for yourself, and they kept it.

Nara didn't owe us Whimsy's diagnosis in real time. Savannah doesn't owe us her mother's abduction as a plot line with daily updates. Parasocial relationships mean thousands – even millions – of people can think they know someone just because they watch or follow them. They don't.

And I've seen what can happen when a celebrity draws a line around an aspect of their life; some of their followers get pissed.

I can understand it.

I felt a bit this way myself when one of the first women whose blog I read, Heather Armstrong, got a divorce.

She is often described as 'the original mummy-blogger' and as much as I despise that term for its reduction of some incredibly talented and brilliant writers and businesswomen, I think in the truest sense? She was exactly that. An original.

Her blog, Dooce, was a revelation to me. Even though I'd already been a writer, editor and newspaper columnist myself for more than a decade, by then I'd never read anyone write about motherhood and mental health and marriage like that before.

F*** she was funny. She managed to turn the drudge of domesticity into the most riveting, insightful, hilarious observations.

One of her most popular and famous posts was about her new washing machine breaking down when she came home from the hospital with her second daughter and how boring does that sound, but it was so good it became a national news story at the time.

Heather was also vulnerable – writing some raw and deeply moving pieces about her depression and anxiety, but it was never unprocessed journal writing, like so much of the first-person internet has become.

Her writing was always exquisite, intentional and precise.

But anyway. When she announced she and her husband were separating, it all went to s***. Understandably, she drew a line around the end of her marriage and refused to disclose any specifics to her readers.

They didn't like that.

I didn't like that.

What do you mean you aren't going to tell us the details — what happened, what he did, what you did, how you felt, how the kids reacted? Are you seriously not going to update us about this in real time?

The word 'parasocial relationship' didn't yet exist. Neither did the words 'influencer' nor 'content creator'. Instagram wasn't even invented yet.

Through her writing, Heather had given millions of women what felt to us like an access-all-areas pass into her life, and we were drunk on the intimacy of it.

We knew her husband Jon, her daughters Leta and Marlo, her dogs Chuck and Coco. We were gloriously invested in these strangers who felt like friends because of the way Heather described them to us and we knew all the intimate details of their lives. Until we didn't.

And it felt like getting a door slammed in your face by a close friend.

That's the exact point at which a portion of her audience turned. They felt betrayed and angry that their part of their access into her private life had been revoked. They went from her biggest fans to her biggest haters.

And she never recovered from it.

Meanwhile, as the family breadwinner — her blog had become so successful she was one of the first bloggers to be able to monetise it — she had to find a way to keep working.

So what happens when your work includes your private life? For Nara and Savannah and every woman with a public profile – even Princess Catherine – how much of yourself must you continue to give to strangers when you're fighting to keep your own head above water?

For Heather, the answer was too much.

Dooce continued for a few more years as she tried to navigate the new world of commercial deals that required her to make branded content with her kids. They were getting older too and had their own opinions about what they wanted to do and how they wanted to be portrayed.

She struggled to pivot into other types of writing or work. She was never able to recalibrate the line between her public and private personas.

Her mental health deteriorated and in 2023 she took her life. She was 47 years old.

I think about Heather a lot. She remains a big influence on my life as a writer and creator in the digital age. As both an inspiration and a warning.

There is no right way to be famous. And there's no right way to grieve in public, just like there's no right way to do it in private. There's only your way. It can be hard to re-draw a line after it's been tattooed across the Internet.

I'm in awe of any woman who has to find a way to do it and I give them all the flowers, all the grace. I think Catherine and Savannah and Nara and so many other women are doing the best they can in impossible situations.

Like so many things I'm thinking about, I wanted to bring it onto Outloud to unpack it with my friends (and yours), Holly and Em. We spoke about it on Friday's episode, as well as airport divorce, my boyfriend, Neil the Seal and another wedding for Nicola Peltz (oh no, she wasn't the bride but at least nobody's mother danced on her husband as far as we know…… f—k it, I'm team Posh forever).

You can listen to the full episode here.

This article originally appeared on Mia Freedman's Substack, Babble . You can subscribe, here .

Feature image: The Today Show/ Instagram/ @naraaziza, @princeandprincessofwales.