Dans Papers - May 25, 2007

Nowadays, it seems like everyone famous has a bestselling book. It's a formula - you get famous (or infamous), grace the tabloids and then find someone willing to help you write your life story. The success of the book is often measured by how famous its author is, not how readable the pages are. Most of these books are disappointing. However, there are a few celebrity-penned manuscripts worth lingering over. One of these is A Model Summer by early 90s uebermodel, Paulina Porizkova. The semi-fictional account follows Jirina, a lanky Czechoslovakian model raised in Sweden, who moves to Paris to escape her unloving mother and boring life and become fashion's next "It" girl.

The story begins with Jirina sitting on a plane beside her new buxom, blonde roommate, Hattie. The girls are on a flight to Paris, where they hope to spend the summer modeling for the suave but smarmy Jean-Pierre. Like so many real-life models, Jirina thinks of herself as awkward and too skinny, but once in Paris, discovers that awkward and too skinny are just what the fashion world is looking for. For the first time, she is pronounced "perfect." The fact that Jirina is 15 years old when the book begins is a little unsettling, but once you get into the delicious scandal of it all, you soon forget her young age.

In Paris, Jirina quickly discovers sex, drugs and the dregs of the fashion industry, and the story takes off from there. The detailed descriptions of Jirina's "discovery" by an old, red-haired hag in her hometown, while accompanying her friend to a modeling workshop, and her subsequent stay in Paris with a slightly dirty old man and his haggard, misunderstood wife are so realistic that it is hard to believe the writer did not find herself in very similar circumstances during her own rise from awkward teen to world-famous model. Once Jirina's career takes off, the story loses most of its insider's edge and trips along the sandy path of a true summer beach novel. From a trip to Morocco, where Jirina fries in the sun, falls asleep on the job and almost loses her gay friend to a vicious street attack, to her befriending of Evalinda, a dead-ringer for the ever-popular Linda Evangelista, the reader sympathizes with the girl and loses all respect for her interchangeably, every other page or so. Soon, car accidents and drug overdoses take over Jirina's life, until her romances with older men take center stage.

The story ends a little too neatly and much of it smacks of teenaged fantasy, but for the most part, the book is delicious from beginning to end. With no great tragedies and just enough scandal to keep it interesting, you can read the whole thing in one sitting and not spoil your supper in the process. The book is obviously a quilt of experiences lived by its author, mixed in with bits and pieces of all the best and worst stories passed along by models and makeup artists behind the runway curtains, embellished just enough to push them over the line of fiction. Believing that all the action in the book takes place over the course of one summer is a difficult task, but that might be the most realistic part of the whole story. Anyone who follows the fashion pages has noticed that it is quite common for an "It" girl to appear and disappear in a few months' time. Stars seem to form as quickly as they burn out in a business centered around selling teenagers' sex appeal to the masses. Jirina's story is an entertaining fulfillment of that stereotype.

Far from cerebral, this book will leave you rapt for hours as you lie on the beach, imagining that it is you rolling around the studio with Rob - the sexiest Australian photographer ever written about - having your picture taken as you strip your clothes off and try to forget your drunken, drug-addled antics of the night before. Kafka it isn't, but no beach bag will be complete without this neat little hardcover tucked into the side pocket this summer. Enjoy!