The model turned writer talks with Shondaland about what went into writing her new book of essays and redefining herself in middle age.
When one thinks of Paulina Porizkova, one might think of the gorgeous supermodel splashed across the covers of Sports Illustrated and Vogue. Or maybe you know the Czechoslovakian native as the face of Estée Lauder from 1988 to 1995. Perhaps you remember her as the star of “Drive,” the classic ’80s music video from the Cars. More recently, one might know her as the beautiful owner of a robust Instagram profile comprised of beguiling beauty and body snaps, candid depictions of adventures with family and friends, and even the openly weeping selfies of a woman overwhelmed with grief over the passing of her husband, musician and former Cars frontman Ric Ocasek.
But the raw, confessional captions of these posts reveal something more substantive — Porizkova’s ability to connect with viewers with a deft turn of phrase. It then becomes apparent these images are designed to engage women in candid, warts-and-all conversations about what it means to be middle-aged, what it means to suffer the loss of your life partner, and what it means to be an empty nester struggling to redefine herself.
Beyond Instagram, Porizkova’s new book of essays, No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful, gives readers a longer, deeper glance into her life’s events and innermost workings. A heartfelt meditation on everything a woman can go through in her life — a successful career, raising a family, loss and tragedy, and betrayal — the memoir is as revealing as it is relatable, proof of which can be found in the already positive feedback Porizkova is receiving from readers. “When people say they like my book, it makes me very, very happy,” Porizkova tells Shondaland. “I didn’t even realize to what extent, quite frankly, until the last few weeks when I’ve been talking to people that have read the book. It’s unbelievably gratifying.”
Here, Porizkova talks to Shondaland about her fan response, what it took to write this book, and where she finds herself now — mentally, physically, and emotionally — in middle age.
VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: You mention in the acknowledgments that you wrote this book in three months, whereas your novel, A Model Summer, took five years. What was your process of writing it like?
PAULINA PORIZKOVA: Well, the process of this one was obviously much different from my novel, but also it’s a much different book because this is kind of like my heart poured out on the pages, and the novel is a construct. I made up a world that I knew well, but I made up characters, and it all had to be in service of the story. Here, the story is my life, so it’s much easier to access [laughs]. I still have a memory, so I remember things that happened, however inaccurately. Also, the novel was an affair of the heart. For this book, Maria Shriver contacted me and said, “Hey, would you like to write a book for me?” — I was thinking something like her own book, I’ve Been Thinking. I had read it, so I knew what she was talking about, and I thought, “Now, that I could do,” because people have been asking me for a tell-all memoir, which I would not do. So, her sort of thinking of it in a different way, more like the way that I write on Instagram and about the things that I write on Instagram, she’s like, “That’s what I want.”
No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
VMS: And it gave you an opportunity to do it on your own terms and kind of share what you feel comfortable sharing, which I would imagine wasn’t always easy.
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PP: Not everything is comfortable. It’s not that it’s uncomfortable sharing; it’s more like it’s uncomfortable processing or remembering. But I have to do that anyway. Oddly enough, it was probably less uncomfortable than the rest of my life preceding it.
VMS: Writing about yourself is such a vulnerable process. Did you feel the process was cathartic?
PP: Yes, to a certain extent. But the catharsis was really in putting my thoughts down on paper and then sort of being able to look over them. The thoughts that I had written down were all boiling away inside of me, regardless of whether I was writing it as a book of essays, or in the pages of my journal, or just in my brain. I mean, it was kind of an all-consuming task anyway because all I’ve been doing since my husband’s death is trying to get a grip on who I am and what I am now, what am I gonna do, and how am I going to process this. So, it’s not like the book made me process something that was unprocessed; it just sort of confronted me with where I was at the moment.
VMS: In the book, you describe being famous as being a “blank page” other people project their fantasies onto. Is writing your way of filling the page yourself?
PP: Yeah! For sure — that’s an interesting way of looking at it! It’s kind of a cool metaphor. I think the way you just said it is a beautiful way to put it. It is!
VMS: What surprised you the most about the process of writing such a revealing book?
PP: I think the most surprising thing about this process was that I could do it, quite honestly. I didn’t know that I could write a book in three months. My writer friends kind of all went, Yeah, you can’t do that. That’s a big, big piece to chew off. So, it was a challenge to me, and the one thing I’ve also come to realize about myself is that I cannot back away from a challenge. I just can’t! I mean, I will kill myself! If somebody challenges me, I will literally do anything to accomplish a challenge. So, this to me was a challenge. I did write from morning to night for three months straight — no weekends, no days off. I just wrote until my brain shut off that day, and I did have some help from this lovely woman named Kerry Egan, who was kind of the reader I could bounce things off of. Without her, I couldn’t have done it in three months — it would have been an impossible task. She was there to read. It was exhausting, but also, in a way, it was so all-consuming that it sort of kept everything else at bay, which in a weird way allowed me to relax a little bit. I had much less anxiety in those three months because there was a task that completely consumed me, so in a weird way that was relaxing.
VMS: You write candidly about how your modeling income dried up a little bit once you reached middle age.
PP: How about fell off a cliff?
VMS: Off a cliff! This also happens to so many people our age who aren’t in the beauty industry. Was the choice not to lean into fillers or plastic surgery a risk in your eyes? How did you process that?
PP: This has sort of an earlier beginning to some extent, I think. This was at the end of my marriage, where I felt invisible to my husband, coinciding with me feeling invisible to the rest of the world. Obviously, both in my career and as a woman and wife, it’s just kind of like I was slowly being erased. The obvious help for this would have been to go and make myself look younger. I cannot tell you why I have not seized that opportunity because, certainly, I wanted to meet somebody that I would fall in love with, and I was out on the singles market, and it felt like, “Looking your age in the singles market in your 50s is not the thing to do.” This is a theory, because I’m not entirely positive that this is it, but I think this has to do with me feeling like I had been seen so much in my life — being looked at and seen — and that nobody gave a s--t about who I actually was. With age and with me not being so brand new and shining, I hoped that people would hear me better. I suddenly started making new friendships with women, and they were less intimidated by me — they were less envious, I dare say. I started noticing that I could connect better, I guess, looking more human. The flaws of wrinkles — because we see them as flaws — were humanizing me. I so desperately want to be seen as the full person that I am.
VMS: That was my take. You just want to be seen as who you are and what we bring to the table as humans, as opposed to the projection.
PP: I kind of knew somehow, on an instinctive level, that fixing the outside to suit other people’s perceptions was not the way to go. I think I was kind of also rebelling against it in some way because I look around me, and I look at my friends that are my age who have not resorted to trying to look considerably younger, and I find them far more beautiful than the so-called pretty young things. I thought if people could see me the same way that I look at my friends, that’s what I want.
VMS: Personally, I feel attitudes about ageism aren’t going to change unless we collectively push back against ageist norms as you have been doing, and just refuse to accept them. If we lean into it, there’s no way to fight back against it. Like, if I lie about my age in a job interview, what am I doing to make things better for myself or anybody else in this world?
PP: I mean, you’re absolutely right. It is kind of a pushback. I do still struggle with it. I do one day of modeling, and I can see all the droopy bits that I’m not super-fond of. I kind of like my wrinkles, but I’m not enchanted with the droopy bits, so I’m kind of leaving things open. I don’t mind looking my age, but I don’t know for how much longer.
VMS: I feel the same way! I just want to look like I’ve slept.
PP: I want to look my age, but like a good my age. It’s really hard to tell what my age looks like because there’s very little representation of my age. I mean, obviously, I’m not the only person out there that’s 57 with an unaltered face that’s in the public eye, but it is more rare than the other way around, right? And I absolutely understand the women that want to do something. It makes you feel better about yourself — it’s easier. But yeah, sure, it’s feeding it back into the system that says that we’re not valuable as we age.
VMS: In the “Magical Money” essay, you describe how hard you worked for clothes to transform your image before ninth grade, but it didn’t stop the mean girls from bullying you. I’m a first-generation American, and I thought clothes and money could help me fit in too. I would love your thoughts on that.
PP: You think what you don’t have is going to make you happier. It’s like the most obvious thing you’re lacking when you cross borders is usually money, and you think the reason that you’re different — you blame it on the biggest, most obvious thing.
VMS: Did those mean girls ever apologize to you?
PP: Of course not! I never saw those girls again. As I was modeling, I can’t say that I didn’t have moments where I would go to Sweden to visit my mom and my little brother and there would be a magazine on the newsstand with my face on it, and I would think, I f--king hope they see this.
The flaws of wrinkles — because we see them as flaws — were humanizing me. I so desperately want to
VMS: You include a comment in your book from a critical person on Instagram who kind of criticizes you for advocating against ageism while looking as you do.
PP: Looks are kind of like fame, which is kind of like a lot of money: It’s all these things that get in the way of us being able to see each other clearly because we project assumptions with certain privileges. You know, I’m as guilty of that as anybody, so I understand the desire to do so, and I understand why we do it because I did it myself. I would write people off because of a certain job that they had, a certain amount of money that they had or visibility, so I understand where it comes from. It’s from you yourself feeling like you don’t have enough, which goes into self-worth. With this book, I had the opportunity to use my voice and to use my life, and I’m doing it so that you can get a full idea of who this person talking to you is about these things. I’m not writing it so that you will empathize with me, because some people will, some people won’t, and it’s just the way it is. But you’ll at least know where all this started because we’re all like little ropes, and we have a beginning, and we have an end, and you kind of have to be able to see both ends to have a clear picture of what it is. So I can’t obviously take you to the end because hopefully that’s still a long time off, but I do need to take you back to the beginning to show you the lay of the land, why I made the choices that I made. This is where my choices came from; this is what they were based on.
VMS: When someone dies suddenly and leaves behind so many questions, you’re forced to find closure yourself. Did the exercise of writing this book help give you closure?
PP: Not so much, because I had been thinking about nothing else since the day my husband died, so all of that work was kind of already done, and I was just putting it down on paper. I was putting down the feelings I was having at the time that I was writing, and they’re pretty much the same today. Writing it didn’t alter it, but I was writing the book a little more than two years after my husband’s death, so by that time I had come to terms with what had happened, and how it had happened.
VMS: Toward the end of the book, you have this full-circle moment when you’re posing nude and you’re doing it gleefully and without shame, revealing yourself on your own terms through your own metaphorical lens and not that of the patriarchy. Was it a conscious decision to end the book on that note, the baring of the soul and the body?
PP: No, but I like it! That’s a great way to put it. So little of what I do is premeditated. So many things in my life are an accident, sometimes luck, and sometimes accident. That’s the life that I seem to have gotten myself into, and my only choice is how I will deal with the consequences.
VMS: You also notice how many of your friends around our age are on antidepressants, which you describe near the end of the book as “emotional Botox.” I thought that was an interesting observation.
PP: I think a lot of people are not gonna be grateful for that description.
VMS: I get it. It’s as if society is trying to keep us from feeling what it is that we’re collectively going through.
PP: Society seems to be structured so that we don’t honor each other’s pain. We are afraid to speak of death; we are afraid of people who are in pain — we don’t know how to deal with it. In the old days — not to say that those were good days — but in the old days, the presence of death was always right there in front of you. You had to kill your own meat. Your children died, and your loved ones died. It was always a presence in your life, so you had to make peace with it. I think in modern society, we have really distanced ourselves because it’s uncomfortable, because it’s painful, and we don’t know how to deal with our own pain. We don’t know how to deal with other people’s pain. So, we just want happy endings and silver linings.
VMS: I guess, in the end, we have to give them to ourselves, maybe?
PP: I’m not sure that that’s even something that one should try to strive for. It’s not all that comfortable, but have you lived a life if you haven’t suffered, and if you haven’t loved? To love is to feel pain — it’s all knotted up together — and I don’t think that we should be trying to separate it. It’s all a part of life.