When I was 18, I moved [...]]]> A friend of mine sent me a link to fashion model Jenna Sauer’s (aka Tatiana Anymodel’s) interview on Jezebel.com with the note, “I wish you could do this questionnaire too—I’d like to see your answers vs “Tatiana’s!” Well friend, here they are. But first, a little background about me:

When I was 18, I moved to Paris to model full time. I worked there for six years before returning to the States to attend UCLA. I wrote about my adventures and misadventures in Paris, Tokyo, London, and Hamburg in my memoir, Paris On Less Than $10,000 A Day. And now I’m a writer. Who writes in neon yellow fleece pajama pants and a gray cashmere sweater full of holes. I’m that much of a fashionista.

Do models eat?

When I first started modeling at 18, I still had some baby fat. I was 125 pounds and my hips were a whopping 93 centimeters, which translates to about 36.5 inches. The ideal measurements for a model are 34-24-34. Although I was 5’11½ ” and had been mistaken for anorexic most of my life, I was told that I needed to lose weight. I started working out and running, and my weight dropped to 122 and stayed there during the course of my modeling years. But I was one of those models who could eat anything and never gain an ounce. My boyfriend was always telling me I was too skinny, and one client told me I was too thin to do his show, so I tried to gain weight (which was stupid in retrospect. I worked the most when I was 122 pounds), but couldn’t. Once I went on vacation to Italy, and my boyfriend fed me five course meals for lunch and dinner every day to fatten me up. On the third day, I vomited from overeating. At that point I decided to accept my weight for what it was and stop trying to please everyone.

There were other models like me, but there were also many models who dieted, and others who had eating disorders. Many of them had mild bulimia or anorexia, so unless you lived with them and watched what they ate, it wasn’t obvious. I had one roommate who only ate baby food and Wasa crackers. I had another who ate large meals and then threw them up. Every now and then you’d see a girl at a show or at a casting who had dropped below 100 pounds, and everyone would be whispering about what happened to cause her to go to that extreme. We’d all feel the need to talk to her and to encourage her to eat, but no one ever dared because we didn’t want her to feel worse about herself than she already did.

Are Eastern Bloc pre-teenagers the only ones who get work?

Well, I can’t speak for today (according to Jenna Sauers, the answer is yes, along with Brazilian girls), but I was working in Paris when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and when the USSR collapsed in 1991, and the market was suddenly flooded by girls named Natasha and Natalia. I liked them. They were shy and polite or bold like army generals and always serious. The Brazilian girls, by the way, were more prevalent in Japan, and they were loud and boisterous. I used to wonder if only rich Brazilians got into modeling because they all acted so entitled.

Is it as tiring as they say?

I remember going to castings late at night during show season. I remember flying to Tokyo and arriving at the Narita Airport after a sixteen-hour flight to find a manager waiting to drive me on show castings—straight off the airplane after having been up half the night. I remember arriving at one of those castings at 9 p.m. to find a roomful of Japanese men sitting in plastic chairs lined against the walls. A man in the middle of the room turned on some loud rock music and told me to dance. And I did. Tokyo was insane like that. I often did two—sometimes three—jobs in a day, getting up at 5 or 6 a.m. and rushing from a fashion show to a photo shoot and sometimes a second photo shoot after that. I would get home and collapse into bed and get up the following day and do it all over again. I had to request a day off when I became too run down. I remember eating acerola drops to fight off colds because they were full of vitamin C.

But there was a lot of down time, too. In Paris I could go a month without working. And even on jobs we spent a lot of time sitting around smoking cigarettes and reading books while the other models got their make-up and hair done, or while other models were shooting. It was one extreme or the other.

Okay, but the money’s pretty awesome, right?

It could be. It was when I worked in Japan, and it was when I worked for Jil Sander. But there were weeks—months—that I hardly made any money at all. Magazines paid $100/day gross. Vogue paid $75/day. You couldn’t live on that. You had to do catalog and shows or advertising and TV commercials to make a living. I think at one point I calculated that I was making $8 an hour once I factored in all the time I spent pounding the pavement on castings. Overall, I averaged $50-$100,000k per year. I think my best year I made $150,000k. It sounds like a lot, but we were spending a lot, too. We were expected to wear designer clothes and get $100 facials, and we paid our own travel expenses to places like Australia and Japan.

Are models vain?

Models are the most insecure people I know. They are acutely aware of every one of their physical flaws from the ear that sticks out to the crooked toe to the veins in their hands. And I think that insecurity often comes across as aloofness.

Does everyone do mountains of coke or what?

Most models I knew smoked pot now and then, but none of my friends did hard drugs. We couldn’t afford meat let alone cocaine (My first year in Paris I ate rice, pasta, and Burger King every night because it was all I could afford.) I heard stories, and I saw track marks on the bottom of a famous model’s feet one time at a show, but I was never into the party scene, so I didn’t witness coke at parties, let alone on jobs.

Are models dumb?

Yes. All of them. I’m kidding. No, they’re not dumb. Most of the models I met read constantly (this was before cell phones and laptop computers much less smart phones, so there wasn’t much else to do). They spoke multiple languages and were as familiar with Ginza, Bondi, the Reeperbahn, and the Marais as they were with their hometown in Ohio. Most hadn’t gone to college because they would have been too old to start modeling at 22, but that didn’t make them dumb. They were worldly and urbane. So what if they didn’t know the definition of “egregious” or “apocryphal”? They could order sushi in four different languages.

Do a lot of models have, uh, a Naomi Campbell attitude?

Fortunately, the only model I ever met with a Naomi Campbell attitude was Naomi Campbell. Models, on average, are very friendly. There is a hierarchy, however. At shows I did, the supermodels only talked to other supermodels. They didn’t talk to us not-so-supermodels. But I attributed that more to the fact that they knew each other from previous jobs than that they were consciously snubbing us. Movie stars at a party don’t generally walk up to people they don’t know and strike up conversations. They talk to people they know.

Okay, so what is the worst part of the job?

Where do I begin? The boredom. The uncertainty. Being thousands of miles away from your friends and family on your 21st birthday. Being told you need to lose weight when you’re 5’11” and weigh 125 pounds. The toll it takes on your self-esteem not to have begun college at the age of 25 when all your friends back home are finishing up their master’s degrees. Shooting bathing suits in December and fur coats in July. Making vacation plans and then having to cancel to do a shoot for Marie-Claire. Making weekend plans and then having to cancel in order to fly to Germany at 5 a.m. the following morning for a catalog job. Not having a TV, a plant, a pet, or long-distance telephone access in your models apartment. Having to buy phone cards to use the payphone down the street to call home. Losing a huge job because you cut your hair too short. Losing a huge job because you refused to cut your hair too short. Feeling like the only thing you’re contributing to the world is making women feel shitty about themselves. I could go on …

First up, my writing goals. As some of you know, four weeks ago I mailed my friend in Texas $1000 with a plan for [...]]]> … to bring you some random updates. I think I need to post Random Updates more often, a chance to say all those things that don’t merit an entire blog post.

First up, my writing goals. As some of you know, four weeks ago I mailed my friend in Texas $1000 with a plan for her to mail me back $100 each week if I make my goals and to send that $100 to a charity each week I don’t. I would have eight weeks to finish the revision of my manuscript, after which she would send me the remaining $200 when I turn my ms in to my (freelance) editor. So here’s how things have been going:

The first week, I sat down with my editor on the phone and outlined specific changes I needed to make to my ms. We came up with enough work to keep me busy for two weeks. Those changes included:

1) Incorporating some changes we had discussed to chapter one
2) Writing transitions (anywhere from a couple of sentences to a page) where I have big time jumps in time (rather than simply “Eight months later …”)
3) Adding a new chapter
4) Going through old journals, talking to former models and photographers, and possibly visiting a studio to get details to help add more texture throughout the book, particularly in the new chapter.

I split those things up into two groups of goals and did them over those first two weeks. It was difficult, and I wrote right up to the last hour, but I did it. What I learned? That if I didn’t have $100 at stake, I would have continued to put off the “difficult” things I needed to do, possibly for weeks or even months. They were: writing the new chapter (because I didn’t know what to write), going through old journals (because I’ve done that before and was sure it would be a waste of time to do it again), and calling my former modeling agent (because I haven’t talked to her in 20 years, and was worried she’d wonder why the hell I was bugging her with my petty requests.) How was it doing those difficult things? The chapter was hard. I really just wrote something to make my deadline, and I’m afraid to read it now because it’s probably crap. But I did it. The journals? I did find some stuff I could use, stuff I have no recollection of finding before. And I still have a LOT more journals to read through. The agent? She was nice. She remembered me, and offered to help me out. Nothing has come of it yet, but at least she offered.

The third week, I had a book review to write. I knew that would take up most of my (two days of) writing time, so I made my book revision goal easy: ten hours on ANYTHING, didn’t matter what it was. So I spent those ten hours reading through journals and interviewing models. And I found that—wow—when I have no resistance I can get 10 hours AND a book review done in one week. And the weeks go by VERY fast. When I say no resistance, by the way, I mean that, given the choice between cleaning the toilet and writing a new chapter, I’ll take cleaning the toilet. But given the choice between cleaning the toilet and reading through journals, I’ll read through the journals. No resistance.

Week four was this week. I had a book to edit for a client, a project I’d put off all month to get my other goals done, and the only way I was going to get it done was to NOT set other goals. So my only goal this week (other than to edit the book) were to send my editor my notes and new chapter and to interview one photographer. I haven’t done either yet, but they’re both easy goals, and I’ll get them done.

So I haven’t accomplished a whole lot these past two weeks, but after having had a “break” from revising, and after discovering that I CAN get more than ten hours of work done in a week, I’m going to make my next week’s goal 15 hours and see how that goes. I have four weeks left to finish this revision and, honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to do it. I’m happy I have just four weeks, though, because I’d rather work hard and then take a break than have this drag on all summer.

Another random update was that I’m crazy swamped with work right now and therefore can’t blog as often as usual. That explains why Monday came and went without a Memoir Monday. So like Christmas in July, Memoir Monday will be coming on Wednesday this week. And I’ll be writing shorter posts for a while. Which ain’t so bad.

In other news, I may have finally found a web designer to redesign my site. I won’t hold my breath, though, because I have already had five (or was it six?) that didn’t work out. I’m excited, though, to finally revamp meghanward.com. It’s long overdue.

Lastly, a lot of people have done these alphabet memes, where they write a post each week about a topic starting with each letter of the alphabet. They are memoir posts, and I linked to one last week. I’ve been wanting to do a regular post called Paris on Less (POL for short), and it occurred to me that the alphabet meme may be a good framework. I’ll start with Anorexia (of course, this is a book about modeling) and keep going until I get to … Zoo? Somehow it feels out of place to write about modeling, Paris, and Tokyo on a writing blog, but then again, that’s what my memoir is about. And I love when other writers share their work on their blogs.

So what do you think? Anorexia anyone?

And now we return to our regularly scheduled blog.

1. Your name/screen name 2. Where you’re located 3. Your blog/website [...]]]> It’s that time of year again—time for a followers contest! All you have to do is follow me over there on the sidebar where it says Google Friend Connect (and if you’re already following me, you can win, too!). Then comment below telling me:

1. Your name/screen name
2. Where you’re located
3. Your blog/website if you have one
4. Your favorite ice cream

I’ll choose a name from among my followers Sunday night and send you a personalized autographed copy (addressed to you) of Daniel Alarcón’s A Secret Miracle: The Novelist’s Handbook AND, because I’m in a good mood after making my goals yesterday, I’ll throw in a 20-page critique of a short story or book excerpt. So come on, lurkers, don’t be shy! We bloggers love followers, and we love comments, so step right up and say hello!