Are you there Gwyneth? It's me, Olivia.
A complete and bias review of "Gwyneth" by Amy Odell.
I love Gwyneth Paltrow.
I have always loved Gwyneth Paltrow. From Holly Holiday to Margot Tenenbaum to Goop and beyond, she is my favorite female celebrity. She is effortlessly cool, unapologetic, and the type of chic I’ve been working towards every day of my life. I also believe she’s incredibly talented, so when I saw Amy Odell, author of Anna, was writing her next biography on Gwyneth, I was basically counting down the days until her publishing date.
The first time I wrote about my love for GP publicly was for the college publication I served as editor-in-chief for—SCAD’s The Manor. You can read it here, but it’s not very good and it looks like their website is broken. I, slightly ignorantly, discussed how Goop was making the world a better place by focusing on spending mass amounts of money on wellness and believing pseudoscience. I still do believe in some of this, but in hindsight, I sound a little bit MAHA, which I am not. I love red40 and prescriptions and going to the doctor.
Where I fall on the spectrum leans more towards spending a lot of money on wellness, and being more health conscious in general. I’ve been trying to transition from synthetic intimates to cotton, eat more whole foods, buy non-toxic cleaning products, things like that. I get weekly reflexology massages, buy expensive skincare and “clean” makeup, and try to do heated workouts twice a week to detoxify the mass amounts of drinking and non-healthy food I eat 50% of the time. I love going to the Goop store on Bond Street without buying anything. I love listening to her podcasts. The Goop Gift Guide is my favorite holiday content. That’s about as Goop-y as I get.
I have debated writing a Gwyneth-dedicated letter many times, but I don’t want her to think I’m a freak when we inevitably cross paths in the future—when that post goes obviously viral, she reads it, looks me up, and remembers my name and face forever. This book has given me an amazing excuse to now do so, and for that, I am thankful to you, Amy. Before reading, I tuned into Amy’s episode of Fashion People with Lauren Sherman, which I recommend doing as a prerequisite if you plan on diving into Gwyneth.
The podcast provided great pre-reading insight, such as the fact that unlike Anna Wintour, Gwyneth made it difficult for Amy to speak to sources, only providing two contacts—the COO of Goop, and a CAA executive. All of the other 200+ people Odell spoke to went mainly unnamed throughout the book, with some alluded to being part of specific Gwyneth chapters, whether it was “a former Goop employee” or “someone on the set of Seven”.
Gwyneth starts with a deep-dive into her WASP-y childhood on the Upper East Side and in Los Angeles, with her mom, actress Blythe Danner, and her father, late producer Bruce Paltrow. In my head, the idea of Gwyneth Paltrow being a baby is funny and odd to hear about. She’s one of those people who was born at 18 to me, like Beyoncé or Odell’s aforementioned first subject, Anna Wintour. The story truly starts when we hear about Gwyneth’s days at Spence, a fancy all-girls school Uptown that was Gossip Girl before Gossip Girl. She was the new girl when she arrived there, quickly garnering attention, popularity, and a reputation—good or bad depended on who you asked. There was “not one doubt she was going to be famous”, said her former classmates, which seemed to be a unanimous thought. She remains friends with some of her Spence peers until the present day, it seems. After she scored big roles like Shakespeare In Love, she distanced herself, arriving at a reunion as a shining star that people felt intimidated by.
A common theme throughout the entire book is Gwyneth’s hypersensitivity to how she looks and her outright fear of obesity, something she wrote as being such in her Spence senior yearbook. When Odell discussed how Gwyneth made wearing a fat suit in Shallow Hal into an eye-opening, life cementing experience, allegedly stating something along the lines of “every pretty girl should have to experience what this is like”, I nearly spit my iced tea out on East Broadway. There were countless moments that were so absurd you just had to laugh.
My favorite part of the book was hearing about The Royal Tenenbaums, one of my favorite movies. Margot Tenenbaum is undoubtedly my favorite fictional character of all time across all mediums, moreso than Detective Olivia Benson, Hannah Horvath, and The Narrator from My Year of Rest and Relaxation combined. She has influenced me to get into eyeliner, be moody to my future husband, and also fall in love with Luke Wilson. The montage in the beginning of the film about what Margot’s life after Royal left the family is the best cinematic montage of the last century. Gwyneth still having the Birkin keeps me up at night, and I’ve never been more jealous of someone than Apple Martin for inevitably inheriting it.
Here are more parts of the book I found so absurd I had to laugh: Anna Wintour calling Gwyneth “baby” when the Goop Magazine was in print? “Baby”? I literally had to rewind the tape three times when I heard that. Anna Wintour calling someone “baby” in front of other people? Almost impossible to believe. The next is that at the first Goop Heath Summit, she had Lena Dunham on a panel of healthy living. If you watched Girls, I don’t need to explain this further. They also seemed to be happening in tandem, Girls and the summit, so it’s really funny that people who paid $1k for a premium day pass went home and watched Hannah Horvath live perhaps one of the most unhealthy lifestyles a functioning person can. While I have to remind myself that Girls is not a docuseries, the humor still remains. Another is that CBK bothered her so much whenever Gwyneth visited the Calvin showroom. This information came like a Sophie’s choice of personal icons, but I don’t think CBK would’ve liked me either.
The last part worth noting is how prominent the art of copywriting was throughout the book. My 9-5 is being a copywriter, so this may be like when you buy a car and then start seeing that car everywhere, so I will double-check with someone who reads it if they also noticed it. Being a copywriter at Goop seems like a nightmare, full of lawsuits for misinformation about health and writing unpaid articles for the Goop Magazine. If I had to write the product description for the infamous jade egg, I don’t know if I would quit or post it on my Instagram grid. Obsessed with it being marked as final sale.
I loved this book a lot. It was one of my favorite books this year. I could not stop talking about it:
Gwyneth did not make me change my perspective of GP, because I already could infer all of the bad parts about her from the reasons why I love her. I’m not obsessed with her because she’s chill. I’m obsessed with her because she is one of the most unchill people on the planet, while still being seemingly very chill. It must be the cigarettes.
It was fascinating to hear about the history of one of the most polarizing people of my lifetime. I always found it so odd how angry she made people. Was it jealousy of her talent, her wealth, her looks, or her exes? I probably don’t see it because I am privileged white woman, and if I wasn’t, I probably wouldn’t like being told to buy a $15,000 vibrator or $1,600 jellyfish tank, jellies not included. Gwyneth is nothing but not consistent, she was the same girl in the Spence classroom that she was in the Goop boardroom, and for that, we have to applaud her.
Once I finished, I almost gave it a standing ovation, but after that, I thought a lot about what Gwyneth must be thinking about this book. When I close my eyes, I picture her in an all-white bedroom, on the biggest bed I’ve ever seen, wearing all white pajamas, furiously flipping through the pages in the light of a single bedside lamp, while Brad Falchuk sleeps peacefully four feet away, but still next to her. Or floating in her massive pool in Montecito, wearing a massive sunhat. Or in the sauna in her at-home spa. You get the point.
To end us off, here are some of my favorite pictures of my queen. Read Gwyneth, you won’t regret it.
