"No Filter" by Paulina Porizkova

I entered my 20s in the early 1980s -- the dawning age of the supermodel -- when Paulina Porizkova, four years younger than me, was one of the most beautiful and most famous faces of the era. Her face was everywhere. 

Then, like so many models and actresses of a certain age, she faded from view. I don't think I'd heard much about her or thought about her in years -- until her husband of more than 30 years, Ric Ocasek of The Cars (one of my favourite bands of the late 1970s/early 1980s) suddenly died in 2019, when he was 75 and Paulina was in her mid-50s. 

Paulina and Ric were separated at the time of his death.  She says he had lost interest in her and hadn't touched her in years. In her loneliness, she'd begun a relationship with someone else.  But the separation was amicable -- they still lived in the same house, and were best friends for life -- or so Paulina thought. While reeling from the shock of her husband's sudden death -- she was the one who found him when she brought him coffee in bed one morning, shortly after he'd had minor surgery -- she learned he'd recently changed his will and cut her out of it completely, saying she had abandoned him. Shortly after that, the new love of her life left her too.  

With little income and no savings of her own, Paulina was forced to sue Ric's estate (which included her own two sons). She'd happily let her career take a backseat to his while she raised their children. She merged her finances with his and let his business manager handle her affairs too, while her earnings and savings played a substantial role in supporting their family and the mortgages and upkeep of two houses (one in New York City and one in the country).  

As she began to rebuild her shattered life, Paulina started pouring her grief into her Instagram account, which is where I rediscovered her. I love Paulina's IG, and recommend it highly to other women of a "certain age." So I was eager to read the book she published this fall:  "No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful." It's not a conventional memoir, but more of a collection of short essays in which Paulina reflects on her life and the lessons she's learned along the way -- about things like beauty, aging, Botox, money, grief and heartbreak, anxiety and depression, nudity and nakedness. We learn about her childhood and how it shaped the adult she became: she was raised by her grandmother in Czechoslovakia after her parents fled to Sweden when the Russians invaded in 1968. They battled to be reunited with her, only to divorce shortly after it finally happened. We learn about her early modelling days in Paris, and about the jealous, obsessive man she married.

It's not a long book. It's a little scattered -- it goes back and forth in time, it's not in chronological order --  but I appreciated Paulina's raw honesty and willingness to bare all (in more ways than one!).  "After a lifetime of being looked at, she is ready to be heard," says the book's blurb on Goodreads. I think she's an inspiration, and a pretty smart cookie, as well as a beautiful woman. 

4 stars on Goodreads. 

This was Book #9 read to date in 2023 (and Book #3 finished in February), bringing me to 20% of my 2023 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 3 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2023 tagged as "2023 books."