So I wrote a book, My Formerly Hot Life, which came out in 2010 (no, I’m not working on another book…book-length story which I’ll tell you if you are truly interested.)
The book grew out of a blog, Formerlyhot.com, that I started doing when I began to feel off-balance and like something I couldn’t name was not quite right. My pop culture references began to land with a thud at the office. I had to wear a good deal of makeup to get that “not wearing any makeup” look. Men on the subway who asked me for the time really just wanted to what time it was! I was becoming a different woman than I had been for most of my life…it wasn’t a bad thing, but I did feel stuck in that not-young/not-old liminal state and it took my brain quite a while to catch up with the reality of who I was at the time.
My Formerly Hot Life was incredibly fun to write and became a New York Times bestseller. I did a bunch of TV to promote the book and it was even optioned several times for television, first by ABC and then Lionsgate.
The marketing hustle was hideous, though. It turns out I am not a “brand,” just a person who doesn’t like to feel as exposed as I was to every rando on social media (and this was before social media was as mean as it is now. I truly do not know how people do it—god bless.)
Below, a few of the things people said about it at the time. Oh, and here’s the book video and a little excerpt.