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i don't believe that extraordinarily hot people should also be allowed to be interesting and intelligent, for reasons of fairness. unfortunately emily ratajkowski did not listen to me

lately i've had reason to consider what it is we want, or expect from, our celebrity class. a year or so ago i made a rule for myself that i had to stop investing myself in the personal lives of people i do not know, because i am the kind of obsessive who has spent an embarrassing chunk of my life in hellish places called things like "stan twitter" and "tumblr" and "one's early teens."

this was so shockingly easy, and immediately so much better for my brain, that it gave me cause to wonder why we like celebrities at all.

in this case, ratajkowski came to us as a beautiful person. we made her rich and famous because she is nice to look at, and because when she is in or on or near things we want to buy them.

as it turns out, we never bothered to really perceive the person we loved to look at, and it turns out she has things to say.

so, okay, beautiful person, we tell her - we will do what we do with all the people like her, and buy "your book" (with a heavy number of winks here to indicate that we know she didn't write it, but that's okay, she's still very lovely to look at).

like many celebrity memoirs, this was a new york times bestseller and background fodder for a lot of instagram stories, but unlike many celebrity memoirs (sorry, and there are exceptions), the author clearly wrote this. and it's a tad deeper than usual.

but for many, it hasn't been good enough!

i am not someone who often tailors my expectations, so i can understand. if an author i love is releasing a book, or a story that sounds good has an amazing cover, i lose all sense of reason immediately and approach kid-in-a-candy-store levels of inhuman excitement, only to parrot the ensuing tantrum-esque disappointment that follows the sugar rush of finally reading it.

but this is a book by a model, and it is called "my body," and so i expected...that. a book by a model about being a model, and what that means for your sense of self.

it is, basically, what i got, albeit far more skillfully done. this is a better book than i expected, the observations more astute and less self-aggrandizing, the writing far lovelier than anticipated.

but if you go into this wanting Grand Declarations about life and patriarchy and body image (and really, people are sure expecting a lot of large-scale generalizations from a book whose title tells you it is about exactly one body), and if you want the author to beat herself up for her pretty privilege, you will not be getting it.

but my expectations were reasonable, for once, and i found myself not wanting it to end.

bottom line: unfortunately for emrata and myself - i remain unable to hate her out of jealousy and pettiness!