The Emily Ratajkowski You’ll Never See (Published 2021) (2024)

I’m not going to tell you 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 first 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 something. We remark casually on the restaurant’s ambience, noting its proximity 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 reflects on her fraught relationship with the huge number of photographs of her body that have come to define 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 model-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. Someone 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 profile in Marie Claire in which the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams lavishly praised her breasts while expressing surprise that she’d read Roberto Bolaño’s daunting novel “2666.” An irritated Ratajkowski tweeted her exhaustion with profiles 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 existential 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 reflection. 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 empoweree, 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.