BODY OF WORK
Emily Ratajkowski has a control issue. And a significant one at that. It’s four weeks out from the release of her debut book My Body – a collection of intimately rendered essays – and editors at a UK newspaper have leaked passages from the chapter detailing her 2013 experience on the set of the controversial music video Blurred Lines in which she claims singer Robin Thicke groped her breast. A clickbait frenzy has ensued with ‘Sexual Assault!’ headlines dominating home pages worldwide. It’s not the kind of pre-publicity she had envisioned.
“It’s definitely frustrating and made me wonder if I’m doing the right thing by publishing the book,” the 30-year-old model, designer, activist and now author laments over Zoom, late one evening from her New York apartment. “I felt a real sense of determination and purpose around it and now I just feel like it’s all just going to be diminished! All I can hope for is that people will read the book.”
It’s also ironic considering control is a major theme of theis not a memoir: it’s more like listening to tracks off an album. Each piece stands alone rather than as a chapter and although it starts with her childhood experiences and builds through to present day, there’s no definitive chronological order.
