LAmonkeygirl said, “my husband has noted that almost every woman he’s ever been friends with or dated has ultimately admitted to having been sexually abused in one way or another.”

J Na Na said, “When I came out to almost all of my female friends, they admitted to me that they’d been sexually abused as well. My own sisters and female nieces have been molested by our grandfather. It’s so sickeningly prevalent.”

KiddyKat said, “Almost every woman I know (my sister and I were molested by the same cousin) has been molested, harassed, or raped.”

colormeroutine said, “My boyfriend once said he thought the 1/10 statistic sounded “too high” to him and he thought it must be inflated. In response I had him list by name all of our female friends and think if he had either heard about or witnessed them being assaulted. By the time he was halfway down the list he looked stunned. This is a normally sensitive boy who has many close female friends, and yet had never made the connections.”

kaiwhakamarie said, “My husband and I have had this same discussion. He can’t think of a single girlfriend he’s had that wasn’t sexually abused and/or raped. It horrifies him.”

I found these statistics shocking. It is true—could it be true—that nearly all of my women friends have been sexually abused at some point in their lives? Off the top of my head I can count four that have told me they’ve suffered from some type of abuse/rape. The rest? I can’t say because I’ve never asked them. I’ve never taken a survey of my friends to find out who has and has not been sexually abused/raped/molested. I know that every fashion model who has worked in Europe has been sexually harassed many many times (I can’t count the number of times men in metro stations masturbated against me or in front of me while I lived in Paris.) But abuse is a different story. Was I ever abused? Sort of. Twice. In the first instance, a stranger lay on top of me in a hotel room and grabbed my breasts, but I fought him off and escaped. In the second, I drank so much in a Zurich bar that I vomited and passed out in the bathroom (this was 22 years ago, mind you). A male friend of a friend offered to drive me home because I was too drunk to get home myself. The minute I hit the pillow, I passed out again, only to wake up to find this friend of a friend performing oral sex on me. Although I was disgusted with him, I partly blamed myself. If I hadn’t drunk so much Amaretto, I never would have gotten myself into that situation. Yet New York Times bestselling author Laura Fraser warns of this tendency to blame the independent woman for the trouble she gets into.

Fraser wrote a poignant Letter to the Editor last year in response to the Times review of her memoir, All Over The Map. The reviewer wrote, “Unattached and lonely, Fraser jets off to Samoa on assignment for a women’s magazine, but an alcohol-fueled flirtation with a surfer on a beach ends in rape.” And Fraser responded: “Joshua Hammer’s review of my book “All Over the Map” (Dec. 5) contains a grave misrepresentation. He describes a scene in which “an alcohol-fueled flirtation with a surfer on a beach ends in rape.” Nowhere in the text is there an indication that I flirted with the man who raped me; that is an assumption, and a wildly inaccurate one. One of the themes of my book is about how, worldwide, women who either desire to be independent or who are compelled to strike out on their own are punished by members of their cultures who are still vastly ambivalent about changing women’s roles. Sadly, Hammer’s review proves that point by insinuating that because I was out drinking with some Samoan fa’afafine (men who dress and act like women), I must have been flirting with the rapist who joined us, and therefore to blame for the ensuing rape. Aren’t we past the notion that “she had it coming to her”?

After reading about Karen Mulder’s sexual abuse, I watched the Danish versions of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire, both fabulous movies and both in which sexual abuse is a central theme. The following morning I received an e-mail from a writing colleague warning about the 24th St. rapist in San Francisco. Sexual abuse is everywhere. Someone you know has been abused and/or raped, whether you know it or not. Fashion models are no more susceptible to sexual assaults than other women, but they are not immune, either. Next week I’ll take a look at what role advertising plays in the prevalence of the sexual abuse of women.

Until then, what do you think? Is sexual abuse as common as suggested by the comments above? Has “every woman you know” been sexually abused? Have you ever experienced sexual harassment or abuse?

My goal is to write ten hours a day, and I quit at midnight last night after writing for nine. I got up at 8 this morning but somehow didn’t start until 10. I pumped, I ate breakfast, I made tea, I ate breakfast again, I made more tea. I checked e-mail. And now I’m blogging. All distractions. But hey – nine hours in one day isn’t bad!

Yesterday I spent a lot of time writing about my childhood and my family. I need to really nail down my personality as a teenager, my early family life, my motivations for moving to Paris when I was 18, and my inner conflict with modeling during this revision. That’s where you come in. I’m going to write a blog post about each of those topics and post them this weekend. One of my blogger friends keeps telling me how important it is to “blog on a schedule”—to either blog once a week, three times, or every day, but keep it consistent. Oh well. There isn’t going to be anything consistent about my blog this week! And here is my first post:

Portrait of a Model as a Young Girl

The freelance editor I’ve hired keeps asking me, “Who was she? What was she like?” when referring to my character, so I’m going to try to define that here. I guess my number one trait was that I was shy. I don’t know that much about the science of shyness–whether we’re born that way or we grow that way. I don’t know if shyness and insecurity are the same thing. I just know that I hid my face in my mom’s clothes a lot when I was a kid, that I hated talking to strangers, and that I was always silent in big groups. I was terrified that anything I would say would sound stupid. I remember thinking that shyness was due to a hypersensitivity, a hyperawareness of people’s reactions to everything I said or did. I was hyper aware of people’s smirks, glances, reactions to things I said or did and probably read way more into them than I should have. I was convinced that I was constantly being judged. I think part of this came from having seven (much) older brothers and sisters who really did laugh at and comment on everything I said. My brother used to say, “Shut up, Meghan. No one cares” whenever I’d start talking. It was a joke, and I knew that and thought it was funny at the time, but I’ve also always wondered if it was subconsciously affecting my reticence.

In addition to being shy about speaking in front of other people, I was insecure about my body. I was abnormally thin to the point that I really looked anorexic, even though I ate CONSTANTLY. I was weak and I knew it. I was nice to everyone at school, even the bullies, because I knew I didn’t stand a chance in a fight against any of them. On rainy days in grade school, we played this game called Poison Snake during recess in the gym. You had to hit people with a ball to knock them out, and the last person standing won. I was often the second-to-last person standing. Not because I was good at hitting people with the ball, but because I was so good at making myself invisible that the kid “winning” the game (usually a boy) wouldn’t notice I was still standing until the game was nearly over and my teacher pointed out that he hadn’t yet hit me. I dreaded climbing the rope in gym class because I was one of the few, along with a couple of fat kids, who couldn’t make it more than halfway up. Ditto for handstands. My arms were too spindly to hold my weight. But lack of strength was not the only problem with my body. I also had extremely dry skin, so dry that I never wore shorts to school, even on very hot days, because my legs were covered in brown, fish-like scales. I used to scratch at them with my long fingernails to try to peel them off, which always resulted in droplets of blood and subsequent scabs that looked worse than the scales. I frequently fantasized about a magic machine that would peel the top layer of my skin off, revealing smooth white legs like all my friends had beneath. Instead, I went to bed many nights wearing wool knee socks and sweat pants, my body slathered in Vaseline beneath the protective clothing.

I think other insecurities resulted from a lack of money. We weren’t poor. We had enough food to eat, and I got tons of presents every Christmas, but we didn’t have as much money as my friends–or at least it seemed that way since my dad’s salary was divided among ten people instead of four or five. I was so tall and skinny that my mom had to pin all my pants at the sides so they wouldn’t fall off. She took them in on her sewing machine when she had time, but until then, the safety pins showed slightly and created pleats down the sides of my legs, which embarrassed me. Fortunately the peasant blouses that were in back then covered them pretty well. I remember in sixth grade, my first year in middle school, wearing my mom’s oversized tennis shoes to class. They were flat like Keds, which were bad for running, they were an ugly beige, which didn’t match any of my clothes, and they were two sizes too big. I really wanted a pair of Nikes like my friends had. My best friend had a white pair with the blue stripe and I really wanted a white pair with a white stripe–white on white like a Malevich painting. But they were $30 and my dad said he couldn’t afford them. So I saved up money washing cars and bought them myself. I loved those shoes and felt fantastic when I wore them. Maybe it was then that I began to equate nice clothes with feeling good about myself. With a big family and everyone owning cars, summer was a lucrative time for me. I charged $1 for a wash, $2 for a wash and wax, and $5 for a wash, wax, and carpet cleaning. I had jars of $1 bills stashed away in the basement where my brothers couldn’t find them. When I wanted the $99 Intellivision video game console, my dad once again told me he couldn’t afford it. So I washed more cars and bought it for myself. I spent an entire summer playing Q-Bert and Space Invaders. My parents never complained that I watched too much television (I watched so much TV that I had the TV Guide memorized) because I always did my homework without prompting and got good grades.

While we had broken tiles on our kitchen floor, dried dog shit (I kid you not) crusted into our outdated shag carpeting, and broken-down cars in our driveway for months at a time, my friends had screened-in porches with perfectly manicured lawns, pantries with the cans all in rows, and sofas that weren’t clawed to threads by cats. The first thing I did every day when I got home from school was get wads of paper towel and go behind all the big armchairs to check for piles of cat and dog shit. There was at least one pile a day, sometimes two, and my mother claimed never to smell it. How we lived like we did, I don’t know. It was chaos–kids and pets and piles of junk on every surface, in every corner. One day when I was nine years old, I got up on a stool and washed all the dishes in the kitchen sink for my mom. She was so happy that I did it again the next day. But the next day I didn’t just wash the dishes. I vacuumed the rugs, folded the laundry, wiped all the surfaces of the kitchen, including beneath all the appliances, and straightened up around the house until it was clean. And I did it nearly every day thereafter for as long as I lived in that house. Our floors were scratched enough that my parents didn’t mind my rollerskating in the house, so I used to clean on roller skates, so I could move faster. I remember clomping up and down the steep carpeted stairs on those things. And they weren’t the boot kind with the rubber wheels. They were the kind with metal wheels that you strapped to the bottom of your tennis shoes, the kind that could do some real damage to a hardwood floor. And that week was the beginning of my obsession with cleanliness.

Because I did well in school, my sister convinced my dad to send me to a private school for high school. We weren’t in a very good school district, and my parents valued education. So my dad talked the nuns into letting me in despite my having missed the entrance exam, and he scraped enough money together to pay the $2000/year a Catholic School tuition cost in the 80s. It was at that school that I became more exposed to people with money. Two of my friends had houses several times the size of ours, with swimming pools and cleaning women and gardeners. (I was shocked to discover that my rich friend X, at 16, had never done a load of laundry. She didn’t even know how to turn the machine on.) Their parents drove Lincoln Continentals and Jaguars, not Chevrolets like mine. They owned companies and belonged to golf clubs and took vacations to places like Europe and Africa instead of the car trips we took every few years to Colorado or Florida. They were extremely kind and they were generous with their wealth, rich friend Y often loaning me her clothes and inviting me stay at her house.

And this is where things get fuzzy. I think about my confidence and self-esteem back then and, on the one hand, I remember having less than they did because I had less money. On the other, I remember being more independent than they were. When I said I wanted to go to Switzerland for a semester, rich friend Y said she would be too scared to leave her friends and family for four months. They kept close ties to the “in” crowd–the attractive girls with money who played sports and socialized with the guys from the all-boys’ Catholic school next store. Although I had filled out somewhat, I was still terrible at sports and never made any of the tryouts. By junior year in high school, I had abandoned my less cool “band” friends for the more outgoing “theater” crowd of which rich friends X and Y were a part. When I tried out for the school play and didn’t make it (except for a one liner as a lingerie model, ironically), I started to accept invitations to model.

While the root of my initial shyness and lack of self-esteem is evident, I think the development of my confidence was due to several factors: one was that I had discovered I was pretty and that the boys liked me. Two was that I knew I was smart, even though my grades dropped significantly in high school as I grew more interested in becoming popular and less interested in school work. Three was that I had an independent spirit. I think that stemmed from my having grown up in a family of eight. As a kid I was smothered with so much love and attention that I craved time alone. When my sister married and bought her own house, I loved staying overnight and never missed my parents. Somehow, the combination of my shyness and insecurities (which made me crave validation and attention), my desire for money, and my yearning for adventure all led to my decision to move to California after high school instead of staying in Michigan to go to college like my friends. I had no particular desire to model and, in fact, wanted to make it on my own without resorting to posing for money. But when working at a T-shirt shop failed to pay the rent, I turned to modeling as a last resort. It was either that or move back home to Michigan, and I thought I’d die if I had to spend the rest of my life staring at tract homes and strip malls, living among people who’d never tasted sushi or seen a foreign film. I craved adventure, and, like Curious George, I had to discover everything for myself, no matter how much harm my inquisitiveness would bring.

And that’s the summary of my personality as a kid. Now I have to figure out how to weave that information into my book, probably in scene. Sigh.

* * *

The Beginning

I’m standing in the storefront window of Anne Taylor at the Twelve Oaks Mall in Novi, Michigan, trying not to fall asleep. A woman reaches out to touch the sleeve of the wool plaid blazer I’m wearing.

“Oh, my God, she’s real!” she yelps, when I flinch. “Betty, look! She’s real!” She takes a step back and points at me.

“Oh, that’s fabulous,” Betty says. “You can hardly tell.”

I’m freeze modeling, which means standing like a mannequin in a shop window all morning with ten-minute breaks each hour to change clothes. I was chosen because I’m a member of the Twelve Oaks Mall fashion panel, a group of high school-aged models who do fashion shows for free. Now three young girls, about twelve, are standing outside the window, pointing and giggling.

“Look, she’s falling asleep,” one says, as I struggle to stare motionless ahead. And now here comes my mom and my sister. My sister’s the one who got me into this, the one who wanted me to model. I’ve never had any interest in fashion, let alone modeling. My favorite outfit is this long blue skirt that I wear knotted on one side with a white shirt, white leggings, and white cowboy boots. I look like I walked straight out of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but it’s comfortable. My sister, however, has plans for me.

“You’re tall and skinny; you should model,” she said to me one day.

“Why would I want to model? Models are dumb.”

“Who cares? You could make a lot of money. Just do it for a while, make a ton of money, and then you can do anything you want.”

“Like how much money?”

“One of my students makes $800 a day doing Dominos pizza commercials, and she’s 17. She’s got enough money saved to go to college already.”

I hadn’t thought about how I planned to pay for college yet—I knew my Dad couldn’t afford it on his own—but $800 a day! I could buy a lot of things with $800 a day—new clothes, a car, another trip out to California to visit my brother.

One of my five brothers (I’m the youngest of eight kids) had invited me out to visit him at Stanford for spring break, and I’d fallen in love with the Bay Area. I dreamt of getting out of Michigan and moving to a place where there were palm trees, where it was sunny in December, and where it never snowed. After much badgering, my sister convinced me to get some photos taken by a photographer her student knew, and things snowballed from there.

First I was stopped by a talent scout from Elite Model Management in New York while out studying at the local library with my friends. She was a Detroit photographer and asked me if I’d had any photos taken. When I told her that I had, she asked if she could come to my house to see them. She talked to my parents and convinced them to let her take me to a scouting competition at a local mall. There I met a sort of model manager, who took me under her wing. She took me to Chicago to meet the agencies there, and they told me I was too high fashion for Chicago and that I needed to go to to New York.

She set up an appointment for me to meet John Casablancas, the owner of Elite Model Management in New York, the largest and most prestigious modeling agency in the world. John took one look at me and told me I needed a nose job. She had me do a couple of test shoots, and the photographer at one of the shoots asked me if I’d ever considered getting a nose job. That clinched it for me. If I wanted to model, I’d have to get my nose fixed. My sister had had a nose job already, so it wasn’t a foreign concept. My friend’s dad happened to be a plastic surgeon, and she took me to meet him. He said he could write it up as a deviated septum so our insurance company would pay for it. All I needed was $200 for the deductible, and I’d be picture perfect. I scheduled the surgery as though it were a routine checkup at the dentist, and then convinced my parents to give me the money. It helped that my sister was on my side.

Meanwhile, the model manager convinced my parents to sign a contract that gave her 5 percent of everything I earned for the next five years. She organized appointments for me in New York, and I went there with yet another one of my brothers, who lives upstate there. The agencies suggested I go to Europe to get some experience and to build up my portfolio. A lot of models start out in Europe because there are so many magazines there—a Vogue, an Elle and a Marie Claire for every country, plus all of their local magazines. Then I could return to New York and clean up doing catalog and advertising jobs.

But I was 16, and there was no way I was going to quit high school and move to Europe, so I gave up on modeling. I did a few local jobs—shoots for The Detroit News and the Metro Times, a fashion show for Xandra Rhodes, and some mall shows here and there, but I gave up the idea of ever making any real money, especially after I lost an auto show job for which I would have been paid $50,000 a year to travel the country extolling the wonders of the Ford Taurus, Sierra, and LTD. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Then the universe conspired to move me to California. First, a friend from school decided she was moving to LA after she graduated and encouraged me to go with her. Then I met a guy who had gone to my high school and moved to San Francisco. “LA sucks,” he said. “Move to San Francisco instead.” Then my brother in New York, after flying me there to do a milk commercial for the American Dairy Association, said, “If you want to go to California, then go. What’s stopping you?” Really? I thought. I can just … go? So I started making plans.

I got a second after-school job to save money for the move. I spent my English classes sitting at the back of the room drawing up plans—how much money I needed, when I would leave, and where I would live and work once I got there. There were details to work out, like how I was going to get to California. I didn’t own a car and didn’t have money to buy one. My parents weren’t willing to help me out because they didn’t want me to go, and I was too young to rent a car. I could have flown, but then how would I take my life’s possessions? I wasn’t going for a couple of months; I was going for good.

Then I ran into the mother of an old grade school friend and discovered that she had plans to move to California, too—to Santa Barbara. I convinced her to move to San Francisco instead, so we could share an apartment. Meanwhile, my sister-in-law got a job in LA, and my brother needed someone to drive his pickup truck cross country from Michigan. I saved money to buy a cap for the truck and had a friend teach me how to drive a stick. All this went on while I was taking the SAT and AP exams, writing college application essays (to please my parents), and acting as the vice president of my senior class.

I arrived in San Francisco on July 7, 1988, and I had a tougher time finding a job than I expected. I eventually got one selling T-shirts at a tourist shop on Fisherman’s Wharf, but I hated it. I wanted to work in a restaurant where I could eat good food and make good tips, but instead I was folding T-shirts all day. I wasn’t even allowed to operate the cash register. My money was running out fast, so I began to sell my clothes and return unused Christmas gifts for cash. Before long, I was dining on 50-cent burgers at Burger King and drinking tap water for lunch. I was broke.

I tried attending classes at City College in the Twin Peaks district of San Francisco, but coming from a private school, I couldn’t stand the way the teacher condescended to us. If we worked really hard, she said, some day we may be able to go to UC Berkeley. Of course I was going to go to Berkeley, you ninnywinny, I thought, and never returned. So there I was, broke, without a college degree, and feeling very very trapped.

“Just call that model manager woman,” my roommate said. “Go to Europe, make $5000, and then come back and go to school.”

So I called her. She set up appointments for me with the three biggest agencies in San Francisco, and all three agreed to represent me. I went with Look because it had the best reputation, and within a week they had me doing test shoots and meeting agents visiting from Paris and Milan. The agents asked me to go to Europe for the shows, whose castings were three weeks away.

“Pourquoi pas?” I said. What did I have to lose?

I stopped in Michigan on my way to Paris to see my family and put some of my things in storage. While here, I agreed to do one last job for the fashion panel, and now here I am, a real mannequin, the French word for “model.” I’m excited to go to Paris. I’ve never been abroad, but I’ve taken four years of high school French, so at least I can conjugate my verbs. I figure with my good business sense, I’ll do well. I plan to model for a year, make as much money as I can, and then apply to UC Berkeley next fall. Until then, Paris, j’arrive!

* * *

L’Arrivée

The taxi driver deposits me on rue Etienne Marcel, at the corner of the six-lane boulevard de Sebastopol. The buildings are dirty but beautiful, their windows like shiny fat women wearing white wooden shutters for jackets and black lace balconies for skirts. Tiny Peugeots and Fiats idle impatiently at red lights while I drag the brown tweed suitcases my parents gave me for Christmas across the street to number 62, the Marilyn Gauthier Agency. I step into the smallest elevator I’ve ever seen, stack my suitcases one on top of another, and squeeze in sideways beside them. I’m relieved to have made it through the airport maze with its giant glass wormholes that suspend travelers over the seven-floor terminal, but I’m worried that Marilyn won’t like me, that she’ll think I’m not pretty enough or outgoing enough, and send me home.

I stare at myself in the full-length mirror as I rattle and hum my way up to the third floor. I examine my new nose, wondering whether Marilyn will notice that I’ve had it fixed, and then pop a tiny zit that has formed beneath my left nostril. The elevator door opens out onto a hardwood floor, and I step out. I’m about to meet one of the most powerful modeling agents in the world, the person who could make the difference between a lucrative international career and a dead-end job selling T-shirts on Fisherman’s Wharf, and I can’t stop yawning, a peculiar response I have to fear.

Inside, a pale woman with thick, dark ropes of hair instructs me to wait on a black sofa beneath a photo of a buxom, almost fat, model. When no one is looking, I stand to glimpse my reflection in the glass of the photo behind me. Together we are the before-and-after photos of a cancer survivor, she healthy and smiling with florid cheeks and golden locks, and I emaciated and pale, my brittle, bleached hair shorn to an inch. I don’t understand why anyone thinks I could model. I don’t look like the girls in fashion magazines. I don’t look like a girl at all with my boyish face and cropped hair. And it’s not like I’m fashionable. I don’t know the first thing about what’s in and what’s out, who’s hot and who’s not. I sit down quickly as two buxom women, one blond and one brunette, appear in the foyer. They’re both wearing décolleté sweaters, knee-length wool skirts, and high heels. In my jeans, hightops, and baggy wool sweater that’s pilling at the sleeves, I’m sorely underdressed for this high fashion capital. I would have changed into something nicer, but I don’t have anything nicer. When the one on the right introduces herself as Marilyn, I see that she resembles the woman in the poster, except that she has dark, curly hair and a hooked nose that my plastic surgeon would have been quick to send for surgery. Her disarmingly sad eyes make me like her right away. Her assistant, Siobhan, has a pug nose and an imperious regard, but a warm smile that makes me like her, too. They look at me and exchange some words in French. I hold my breath.

“Come along, dahling,” Siobhan says in a British accent, motioning for me to follow. I exhale. I’ve passed the first test.

In the booking room, four agents, called bookers, sit around a large, round table—all dressed to kill: Kevin in a designer cowboy shirt, Anne in a fur-collared blazer, Etienne with a silk scarf around his neck, and Ulla in cat-eye glasses. A chair remains empty for Marilyn, who looks like a Balla painting in her constant flurry of motion. I’m taking everything in, memorizing their clothes, their mannerisms, and the intonation of their words. I want to be a straight-A model.

1) I’m learning the value of stating what seems obvious. This writer defines basic modeling terms and explains the details of daily modeling events that I think people really want to know. The writing isn’t good, but the informative details are. I’ll add more of those to my book.

2) I’m reminded on every page of what NOT to do in a book – pat character descriptions, meta-moments when she addresses the reader as “you,” and personal traits that make me want to smack her.

3) I’m reminded what traits make a character likable, make you want to root for her, and follow her for 300 pages: a strong will, strong convictions, a healthy self-esteem, and good moral judgment.

4) I’m reminded that trash like this gets published every day, so I shouldn’t give up anytime soon.

I was an oops baby, the last in a line of eight kids, born nine years after my brother. “I’m an only child with seven brothers and sisters” I told my parents after learning about the psychology of birth order in my high school Psychology class. I was too tall and too thin to be beautiful, or even very pretty. I had abnormally dry skin, and I wore my pants pinned at the sides so they wouldn’t fall down. I thought models were dumb and superficial and only gained a passing interest after a girl I lifeguarded with told me she had earned $800 in one day. I was from a middle class family and went to a private high school where a lot of girls had a lot more money than I did (In fact, I think all but one of my friends had more money than I did.) And I wanted money. I wanted the entitlement that came with it, the confidence, the carefree attitude, and the STUFF—fancy homes and cars and clothes. Our Catholic school uniforms were supposed to make us all equal, but you could tell who had money and who didn’t by the cars they drove to school, the jewelry, the hairdos, and the clothes they wore on non-uniform days.

In addition to money, I wanted adventure in my life. Maybe it was all the books I had read—from Danny Dunn, Time Traveler to Around the World in Eighty Days. I had wanted to study abroad during my junior year (Switzerland, so I could heli-ski) or do Outward Bound in New Zealand, but my parents couldn’t afford either one. I was bored to death with suburban Michigan with its strip malls and house parties, and I wanted to see the world, to ride subways in big cities and travel to foreign countries and learn foreign languages. I guess French class fostered my particular interest in Paris.

I also wanted romance. I’d been a romantic since I was 14 (again, maybe thanks to all the books I read), and I fantasized constantly about meeting the perfect boyfriend—gorgeous, funny, intelligent, nice—and living happily ever after. But while I was reading books, the more popular, more outgoing, more beautiful girls were getting the guys.

Modeling offered it all—money, foreign travel, validation and the chance to meet gorgeous guys. I think my mom filled my head with those romantic notions, too. She was always reading romance novels and watching television (including “Dallas,” “Dynasty,” and General Hospital”), and she was enthralled by glamour—wealth and fashion and romance. She would tell me, “No guy will date a picky eater” when I wouldn’t eat my greens, instead of “They’ll make you healthy and strong.”

I’d always been a serious student, and planned on earning a PhD one day, so it was out of character for me to ditch college to move cross-country to San Francisco, and then on to Paris, by myself at 18 to work as a fashion model. I guess I was a daydreamer, someone who fantasized about living in Thornfield Hall—the whole fairytale lifestyle as I mentioned above. But is that enough motivation? Or is there something I’m missing? I didn’t have a bad childhood, didn’t come from a broken home (although it was plenty dysfunctional). Is wanting money, adventure and romance enough to entice you to follow me for 300 pages through Europe and Japan? Or do I need something more?

Below is the first modeling picture I had taken after I cut off my long copper hair, shaved it up the back, and bleached it platinum. I was living in San Francisco, and I was 18.