Even Elle Macpherson, the model known as “The Body,” faced her fair share of rejections early in her career: as she recalls in her new memoir, simply titled “Elle,” the prevailing attitude he time was that “Brown-eyed girls don’t make the covers” of major magazines.

Except in his case, they did.

The slender Australian set a record for most Sports Illustrated swimsuit covers and appeared in films and TV shows, including a recurring role on “Friends,” before starting a wellness company. be.

“It took me a long time to adjust to the woman I am today,” Macpherson said during a video interview from her home in Miami.

To illustrate her point, she shows the risky cover of her memoir, a nude photo taken decades ago by Ellen von Unwerth, then the image of a relatively fresh face on the book cover. “It’s almost like this is the girl I was throughout my career and the woman I am today,” she says.

Her ex-husband, Gilles Bensimon, photographed the contemporary image of Macpherson in jeans and a T-shirt with minimal makeup, her blonde mane framing her face. She credits Bensimon, an iconic fashion photographer, for giving her a timeless style tip about the power of a plain T-shirt and light makeup.

“It was good advice,” she said in the conversation ahead of the US publication of her controversial memoir.

“Elle,” released in Australia a few months ago, angered medical professionals and cancer survivors over Macpherson’s film. delightation in the book that she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017 but chose alternative therapies to overcome it instead of chemotherapy. “Saying no to standard, medical solutions was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life,” Macpherson writes in his memoir.

Although negative reactions were forbidden during our conversation, Macpherson considers the chapters on his cancer journey and his treatment for alcohol addiction to be the most revealing. She said she realized she had a drinking problem after giving birth to her second son in 2003. “All I thought about was that bottle of champagne in the ice bucket,” she wrote .

Some of these chapters are taken from Macpherson’s diary at this time; others are written almost in the stream of consciousness.

“As I remembered it as I wrote, it came naturally,” she says. “I just sat there and it flowed. It’s almost as if it wrote itself.

Macpherson hopes his experiences “will be helpful to people who are struggling or wondering about an addiction in their life and how to approach it.” I think people will be surprised by how much we have in common.

She also writes about the discomfort she felt on camera as “Supers”, her name spoken in the same breath as Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford, as well as the perfectionism and need for control that emerged during his life. sunny childhood on Sydney’s north coast, although it helped define the beach ideal of Australian surfer chic.

Beauty is “not about the color of your eyes, or the color of your hair, or your cheekbones, or your weight,” she says. “That’s something I find really encouraging over the last 40 years.”

She adds: “I hope this book helps young girls find themselves and discover their unique strength and beauty early in life. Not when they’re 60, although there’s nothing wrong with finding it at 60.