Hadn’t Emily Ratajkowski been famous, she would still be a writer.
“It would be very different, obviously”, she says in an exclusive interview with Her Campus, “but I wonder if I wouldn’t have just written a book about something else. Maybe I would have rode to a similar-ish place”.
Her New York Times best seller “My Body”, a collection of essays discussing feminism, sexuality and the commoditization of women’s bodies, however, was the first solid step towards her career as an author, despite of her enduring interest and swift rise to fame. Up until her article “Buying Myself Back: When does a model own her own image?” for The Cut went viral, little did we know that her life would later blossom into her debut novel — and that the narrative would be at the cost (quite literally) of herself.
“i had the desire to create something”
“I have learned that my image, my reflection, is not my own”, Ratajkowski wrote back in 2020, reflecting on episodes of her life as both a model and public person. Quoting Rebecca Solnit’s “you thought you were a mind, but you are just a body”, she wrote about being sued for reposting a photo taken of her by a paparazzi and having nude pictures shared and sold without her consent, among other pivotal — and painful — memories of her career and fame.
The release of her powerful memoir in 2021 felt inevitable to Emily, though. “I decided that it would be something I would share with the world”, she explains. “I had almost this feeling that was like a deep itch I had to scratch. I had the real desire to make something, create something.”
Exploring the line between empowerment and objectification, the non-linear novel evokes and questions episodes of abuse and discomfort in her career and position as a woman, all with an unexpected familiarity to the female reader. Among the pages is also her dissociation from herself — “I don’t even recognize my body as me”, she wrote, recalling her photoshoot with a fashion photographer who she claims sexually assaulted her and turned her nude, drunk pictures into a book without her consent.
Because of that, she says that the honest, deeply personal investigation really made her understand why people write fiction.
All these men, some of whom I knew intimately and others I’d never met, were debating who owned an image of me.
Buying Myself Back: When does a model own her own image?
Going through a very hard time in her life when authoring it, the entrepreneur said that the piece was not only something she did to be proud of herself, but also a way to process the experiences she’s had. “I was determined to find self-blame. It was a self-flagellating kind of thing, wondering ‘what did I do wrong?’, ‘how did I get to this place in my life?”, Ratajkowski reflects.
And, though a lot of the stories might seem hard to read (and, especially, to live), the model admits that the “f*cked up truth” was that she liked to put pen to paper and going, you should have done things differently. She jokes it was like BDSM, but also incredibly validating.
commodificatoin & feeling ‘seen’
“As a body and as a commodity, I think that writing this book was the first time I felt like I was really being seen”, Emily adds. “I just felt like — oh, this is true. It has really transformed me, putting it out into the world and having it been acknowledged.”
“I couldn’t find it for a really long time”, she admits, “but I wanted some kind of moment, even just a millisecond, where I was in my body and appreciating it not for the way it looks.” And that’s why her favorite part of “My Body” was the anecdote in the novel’s last essay, in which she was nearly pregnant and riding a bike and felt, simply, love and appreciation for her body and what it could do.
During her teen years, Emily recalls she had a mantra that went something along the lines of, life can’t be dictated by how you are perceived. Though she now sees it as kind of hilarious — because she “went on to build a career basically over on being perceived” —, in a lot of ways the advice has returned to her life.
what emrata wants you to know
“It’s just about not giving a sh*t and doing what feels good to you”, she explains, while adding that her advice to her 20-something-year old self would simply be, don’t be so hard on yourself. “I felt like I was constantly making decisions and constantly making mistakes. But there’s no escaping that, it’s just going to happen”, the model argues, while saying that this is part of growing up.
Rather than beating yourself up because of it, she tells that everyone on their early twenties should just do the things they want to do and become who they want to become, give and take a mistake — or two, or three.
And, while “a woman’s body will never be non-political”, the nuances to her vulnerability, commodification and identity in “My Body” were the release she craved and wished to convey. “There are no good guys and no bad guys”, she emphasizes, while pointing out that she just wanted to tell her story.
Also, the New York Times best selling title? “It’s a pretty exciting little add-on right here”.