what the hostess said to Emily Ratajkowski. Instead, I will tell you this: We
are having lunch at a restaurant. We consult the restaurant’s menu, which
boasts many items. Ratajkowski, a model who fi rst became famous for
appearing naked in a music video , orders something. I, who have never
been in a music video but have been naked many times, also order some-
thing. We remark casually on the restaurant’s ambience, noting its proximi-
ty to various locations. I turn on my recorder. Each of us is wearing clothes.
We are here to talk about Ratajkowski’s new book, ‘‘My Body.’’ In it, she
refl ects on her fraught relationship with the huge number of photographs of
her body that have come to defi ne her life and career. The book’s marquee
essay, ‘‘Buying Myself Back,’’ which describes how Ratajkowski ended up
purchasing a print of her own Instagram post from the appropriation artist
Richard Prince, was published to great notice in New York magazine last
fall. Ratajkowski also wrote that the photographer Jonathan Leder sexually
assaulted her in his home after a photo shoot when she was 20.
At lunch, Ratajkowski explains that New York magazine took ‘‘Buying
Myself Back’’ from her book proposal. In fact, she began working on ‘‘My
Body’’ without anyone but herself in mind, jotting down notes on her phone
as they occurred to her. One day she realized she was writing a book. Several
times, Ratajkowski characterizes writing as a means of ‘‘organizing’’ her
own thoughts — not as an act of branding but out of what strikes me as
the genuine curiosity of a woman whom constant exposure has deprived
of the possibility of self-knowledge.
But Ratajkowski knows she is in an impossible position as a mod-
el-turned-writer. Indeed, the author has spent her career dodging the
backhanded compliment that she is the ‘‘thinking man’s naked woman.’’
Failure will be met with schadenfreude; success, with smug surprise. Some-
one recently asked her who her ghostwriter was. Others asked if her face
is on the book’s cover. (It isn’t.) After ‘‘Buying Myself Back’’ came out, a
journalist unearthed a 2018 profi le in Marie Claire in which the writer
Thomas Chatterton Williams lavishly praised her breasts while express-
ing surprise that she’d read Roberto Bolaño’s daunting novel ‘‘2666.’’ An
irritated Ratajkowski tweeted her exhaustion with profi les that have boiled
down to ‘‘She has breasts AND claims to read.’’
We cannot see ourselves. This is an existential fact, as sure as death. Yes,
we can look down at our limbs and trunks, but we cannot enter our own
regard as subjects; we cannot see ourselves seeing. For a model, this exis-
tential fact is promoted, or relegated, to a professional one. ‘‘I don’t even
know what I look like anymore,’’ Ratajkowski confesses to me. ‘‘I can’t even
tell what’s a good or bad picture in the same way. It’s just another picture.’’
Sixteen years in the modeling industry — over half her lifetime — have left
Ratajkowski burned out and grasping for narrative.
With ‘‘My Body,’’ Ratajkowski has created a new mirror for glimpsing her
own refl ection. Some essays recount the author’s hustle as a young model
who often found herself in troubling situations with powerful men; another
is written as a long, venomous reply to an email from a photographer who
has bragged of discovering her. Throughout, Ratajkowski is hoping to set the
record straight: She is neither victim nor stooge, neither a cynical collaborator
in the male agenda, as her critics have argued, nor some pop-feminist empow-
eree, as she herself once supposed. Today she is just a girl , standing in front
of 28 million Instagram followers, asking them to take her seriously.
Whether she’ll succeed remains to be seen. While Ratajkowski wrote ‘‘My
Body’’ to reassert control of her image, publishing it will mean releasing
yet another piece of herself into the world. ‘‘That’s the misery and the joy
of it,’’ she tells me, comparing the process to giving birth to her son, now
8 months old. In the book, Ratajkowski remembers asking for a mirror
when she was in labor, so she could see her body. ‘‘I wanted to witness its
progress,’’ she writes. This is a modest goal, and equally profound, espe-
cially for someone who is looked at for a living — to regard oneself, without
preconception or judgment.
Photography, for all its ambition, cannot bear witness; nor, for that
matter, can the mirror, save perhaps in moments of rapture or deep qui-
etude. Before the mirror, we had the mysteries of water to betray our
forms; before that, the glowing eyes of another animal. Ratajkowski knows
there is something hungry in the camera. It takes what it wants and holds
it forever — ‘‘like a footprint or a death mask,’’ as Susan Sontag wrote. To
cope, Ratajkowski has internalized the gaze; walking a red carpet, she
hears the clicking of photographers and knows, as if by echolocation,
what each photo will look like — and that none will capture the real her.
Ever since her private photos were posted to 4chan by hackers, she has
started to assume that every picture taken of her will become public, just
to quell her anxiety. ‘‘There are no images that are just for myself,’’ Rata-
jkowski remarks sadly.
The phrase reverberates in my mind as we talk. ‘‘For better or worse,
I’ve always been drawn to overexposure,’’ Ratajkowski writes in ‘‘My Body,’’
describing the thrill she still gets when uploading a photo of herself to Ins-
tagram. I’m drawn to exposure, too; I’ve written extensively about my own
body, and like Ratajkowski, I’m ambivalent about the attention it has won
me. (I can confi dently say it’s why I was assigned this article.) ‘‘I knew that
when I met you,’’ Ratajkowski discloses later; it’s why she feels comfortable
talking to me. But if I’m sympathetic to her compulsion, I’m not doing her
any favors by writing a profi le about her, which is just another kind of portrait.
Then again, she was the one who called it ‘‘My Body.’’
Could we help each other out, one woman to another? In this context,
the idea of equality would be a fantasy; we cannot step outside our roles
and histories and meet, as it were, in the wild. But it could be interesting
to try. I ask Ratajkowski if she would like to take some Polaroids with me.
As I imagine it, we would take photos of ourselves, by ourselves, and then
share them with each other — and no one else. Ratajkowski interjects. ‘‘It
would be about the experience of taking them,’’ she says simply: how we
felt, whether we could trust each other, whether we could see each other,
ourselves. She agrees to the exercise, fascinated by the idea of a photograph
of herself that, by some miracle, nobody will ever see. ‘‘I do love the idea
of our bodies being in conversation,’’ she later tells me. I am struck by the
tenderness of her remark. When I ask what we should do with the photos
afterward, Ratajkowski smiles. ‘‘We have to set them on fi re.’’Ratajkowski was born in London in 1991, but raised in Encinitas, Calif.,
a surf town outside San Diego. Her mother was an English professor; her
father, a painter and high school art teacher. The house where she grew up,
which her father built himself, was fi lled with eccentric details: mismatched
doorknobs, exposed beams and walls that stopped short of the roof. ‘‘It’s an
artist’s house,’’ her mother would tell guests sheepishly. As a girl, Ratajkowski
would be awakened by ‘‘the rhythmic sound of my parents having sex’’ — or
more often, their vicious screaming matches. She would sink onto the fl oor of
her bedroom and play with imaginary friends until it ended. But even when
the house was silent, Ratajkowski writes, ‘‘I could hear my parents’ thoughts.’’
Early in ‘‘My Body,’’ Ratajkowski describes a diptych of herself and her
mother as young girls; when guests see the photos in her parents’ livingI’m not going to tell you
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