My Body

Emily has captured-with the acuity of an early Joan Didion investigating the culture of California-the complicated terrain of having a body people want to sell and having her own agenda she refuses to give up. Her prose is by turns honey smooth and vicious, uproarious and wounded. She knows the pain that lives in every woman and she isn't afraid to link arms and say she's been there, and that it hurts. This is the book for every woman trying to place their body on the map of consumption vs control, and every woman who wants to better understand her impulses. It left me much changed. ― Lena Dunham

These powerful essays mark a blazing, unexpected literary debut. Emily Ratajkowski interrogates beauty, sex, power, objectification, fame, and betrayal-both by self and other-with lucidity and scorched-earth honesty. I read these pages, breathless with recognition, and the thrill of reading a new voice telling it like it is. ― Dani Shapiro

Emily Ratajkowski's first essay collection needs to be read by everyone. She explores body politics - and the politics of her body - through a uniquely feminist lens in stories that are both page-turning and moving as hell ― Amy Schumer

This irresistibly titled debut from supermodel turned writer Emily Ratajkowski fills in some of the story of just how Ratajkowski came to have one of the most famous faces in the world. But more than that, the book is invested in probing what it means to be in possession of such a face. My Body is a memoir, but it's also-like Sweetbitter or In the Land of Men-a slow, complicated indictment of a profession and the people who propel it. Ratajkowski doesn't so much direct blame at any one person or organization as paint a personal picture of what it was like for her to be young, naive, ambitious, and smart-and to feel reduced, far too often, to a collection of body parts. The book will be alluring to anyone who wants to know what it was like to dance in Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" (the cringey video that made Ratajkowski a household name) or what it was like to act alongside Ben Affleck in Gone Girl, but it will deliver a more nuanced and introspective rendering of her interior than those who come to it with those surface interests might expect.

― Vogue

Raw, nuanced and beautifully written. A moving and enlightening experience to join a woman openly exploring such deep parts of her physical self via the written word. A truly impressive debut

― Emma Gannon

Essential reading

― Red magazine

My Body is an excellent - if we excuse the pun - body of work. Ratajkowski writes with curiosity, intellect and acute awareness... What may surprise readers is not so much the quality of the prose, which is excellent, but that it is not an easy, pop-feminism read. It's a searingly personal piece, which frequently asks more questions than it answers ― Harper’s Bazaar

When her gaze is on herself it is superb. My Body is the end of Ratajkowski's disassociation. She doesn't answer the question: what is a woman for? How can she? It is a universal question. But at least she asks it, and it feels revolutionary ― Telegraph

A quietly furious disquisition on flesh and capitalism ― Evening Standard

About the Author