It’s sold a range of hair products and at least one “innovative lifestyle beauty brand.” It’s sold a few lines of intimates and untold numbers of swimsuits.
Her publisher, Metropolitan, went for it, which, though those things are often out of an author’s hands, was probably smart thinking.
“How it’s perceived, how I’ve used it, how it’s been used, what access it’s granted me, how it’s also made me at times feel like I’m nothing more than a body.
It’s good business for models to be aware of how they appear, but few have interrogated the political implications of their body for them and for those who consume it in the form of a book.
She kept doing the job over the years, impelled forward in the industry not necessarily by passion for the work, but by the money that she made and the freedoms it afforded her.
And then there is My Body, which undergirds it all—especially “Buying Myself Back,” an essay about trading her image back and forth, which doesn’t seem like it will ever have a happy ending, or any ending at all, considering that the story we’re about to get into has only continued on in real life outside the book of essays.
In one instance, Richard Prince included her in a show at Gagosian gallery in New York, for which he blew up Instagram posts on large canvases, alongside a comment he had left there.
She hadn’t wanted to pay for the smaller piece since it was a gift, but as she describes in the essay, some of her own photos were part of the enormous celebrity iCloud hack at the time, literalizing the loss of her image to a devastating degree, and providing an unfortunate reminder that her ex had his own photos of her.
It made her think about the essay she wrote, about the conceptual art that she never volunteered for, about ownership, about women, about OnlyFans, about revenge porn and the iCloud hacking and how hard it is to protect an image, especially—especially—if your image is a valuable asset on which you’ve built your livelihood.
And so she made the NFT and sold it at Christie’s in May for $140,000 before fees.
It occurs to me as we’re talking, but not for the first time, that it can feel absolutely nuts for someone like Ratajkowski to want to put something as revealing as a book of essays into the world, to give up more of how she thinks and risk being taken, bit by bit, out of context.
It’s already happened, though, with the essay she titled, “Blurred Lines.” The Sunday Times aggregated quotes from the piece in October, and sites spun it out across the internet, something she very much did not want or enjoy.
Looking back now, the song and video felt like they were created in a lab to enrage second-wave feminists and garden-variety conservatives alike, baiting what we would now call “the discourse.” At the time, Ratajkowski, who was the standout in the video for both her clowning and her body, defended the project in interviews.
Ratajkowski recalls those interviews in the introduction of the book, and wrote that she feels “a tenderness toward my younger self.
If you only read these, you’d think that the book’s big reveal is that a tipsy Thicke had allegedly groped Ratajkowski’s breast on set, which the video’s director, Diane Martel, corroborated to The Sunday Times.
It’s not at all unusual when a published story gets dismantled and sold for parts on today’s internet, so it probably wasn’t a surprise when this part of the essay fueled a news cycle for a few days.
“It feels worse,” she said, worse than having photos of her distributed against her will.
Like how sometimes you get to do something you really want to do—like write a book of essays—in part because of a day of work that you signed up for many, many years ago, where someone did something he wasn’t supposed to do because he could, and that can be hard to reconcile.
At one point, she declined to publish the piece as an excerpt, as she had done with “Buying Myself Back,” preferring her readers to encounter it entirely in its context.
“It’s been a little strange to have even people who are well-meaning come up to me and say, I’m so glad you spoke out about Robin Thicke,’” she said.
“The part that not a lot of people are focusing on is that I really was enjoying myself,” Ratajkowski said.
So, yes, writing about one’s most vulnerable moments within a ravenous internet might be, as she joked, “stupid.” And then as soon as she voices the point she presents the counterpoint.
They have a sense of her based on limited snippets of social media access, and they think they understand her because of her street style.
Despite the complications therein, the “Blurred Lines” video was undeniably her launchpad, and it did to Ratajkowski what launchpads have done to many beauties in the music and film industry—that is, flattened and amplified.
You can easily see a person for whom this is true wanting to explain their whole selves and analyze their own rare position in the culture, to be the call that’s coming from inside the house .
Before My Body is officially released in the world, she has to promote it, and she must watch again as someone else takes the process of her writing a book and puts her in a context of their choosing.
I asked to meet her in person because the job of telling a small story of a person can be much easier to do when you’re in the room with them.
The frame that met me comprised unadorned white brick walls, a small white chest of drawers with black handles, and Emily too.
“I now have a son and I live in New York City and I want to have a certain type of lifestyle and it’s pretty hard to turn away the opportunities that come with modeling,” she said.
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