models – She Lit

*Given a copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The book review below may contain spoilers*

Summary: A woman uproots her family from Paris to Los Angeles to support her husband’s dream job. As soon as she is in L.A., she crashes her car into another belonging to a supermodel. They are then transported to a 1996 photo shoot in Mexico, where they first met early in their careers. The familiarity helps them become friends, then lovers. As the affair ensues, more revelations emerge in their collective memories about what really happened in Mexico.

Synopsis: Cecilia Chen is a Jamaican-Chinese photographer who uproots her family from Paris to Los Angeles to support her husband François’s directing gig on a franchise film. An American raised in New York, she worries about bringing her teen son, Julien, and preteen daughter, Lucie, to California. It’s 2015, a time when her kids may be identified as only Black and be in danger because of it. And François recently revealed that he cheated with a young actress. So, she is pressured to move abroad to keep her family together.

As soon as she is in L.A., she crashes her car into another. Supermodel Anouk Ferrand steps out. Convincing herself that she almost killed the celebrity, Cecilia is then transported to a 1996 photo shoot in Cabo San Lucas. It’s where she first met Anouk, then a rising model, while working as a photographer’s assistant.

Cecilia eventually tells Anouk about their connection. But she keeps it simple. Deep down, she knows something awful had happened to Anouk, but her memory can’t access that part of the trip. They become ladies who lunch, gallivanting around the city with their wealth and flaunting their love for the arts. Then, lunch turns into forbidden rendezvous and global getaways that force both women to give into their desires out of sight of their husbands and children.

The full-blown affair stimulates more memory collection from the shoot where they first met. The weekend becomes less fragmented throughout the book as we revisit different scenes across the present. Once Cecilia realizes what happened to Anouk, she wonders if the woman she has fallen in love with has pieced together another reality.

Theme: Beauty & Sexuality

Cecilia is mesmerized by Anouk’s beauty at first glance in the flashbacks and in the present. With an eye for natural beauty, she centers her latest visual art exhibit around the topic and the women she believes meet the threshold. Anouk is one of her subjects, but it shows how Cecilia feels insecure and voiceless among the beautiful people, including her Jamaican mother, who obsesses over beauty and perfection.

As her idea of beauty drives her art and her extramarital affair, she tries to dodge the regret and uncertainty of the past that leads to deceit.

Theme: Race & Ethnicity

Race, ethnicity, and culture are central themes in Cecilia’s point of view. She constantly mentions her Jamaican-Chinese background as she relates to the family she started and the family she was born into.

As for Julian and Lucie, she worries about how they will be perceived in the U.S. compared to France. Her concerns come true as both her children learn that they are Black in incidents with peers that are out of her control. As she falls deeper in lust, she has to pull herself out momentarily to remember that her children need additional care in the face of their racial classification.

Anouk has roots in Martinique, so she is part-Black but fair-skinned. This intrigues Cecilia as she notes she is the darkest in her Caribbean family. She senses how Anouk skates through life as a supermodel married to a billionaire with her fair complexion. While Cecilia worries about how she’s perceived as a Black woman in America, she is drawn to witnessing how Anouk doesn’t have those worries, though they have roots from islands in the same ocean.

Theme: Regret

The story is built on regret and uncertainty. Cecilia convinces herself she owes Anouk because she knew something happened in Mexico decades ago. She hides this regret for not being able to save Anouk during that shoot, though she wouldn’t know what to save her from.

The affair also forces her to question whether she would have ended up with her husband after falling for Anouk at the shoot. If she had saved her all those years ago, would they have ended up together then? Cecilia wonders about the likelihood amid her frustration that her husband cheated on her while he was away from home, hence why L.A. is now her new home.

As the regret weighs on her, she learns from Anouk that her ex-boyfriend, Lorry, also lives in L.A. Lorry is a meditation coach who serves wealthy clientele. This revelation sends Cecilia into another nostalgic tailspin, recalling memories of love and disappointment with the man she believed she would marry. He broke up with her while she was away on the shoot. The pivotal moment gnaws at her even more as she figures out her connection with Anouk and Lorry, then and now.

Conclusion: Lust, betrayal, greed, and wealth underlie the main character’s thought process as she questions how they intersect with her life. That being said, it’s a juicy, slow read that forces the reader to absorb the environments, the interactions, and the actions that make the characters feel authentically messy.

In Cecilia’s voice for the present and third-person voice for the flashbacks in Mexico, the character’s emotions jump off the page. She is working through her new life and wondering if she is making the right decisions when people from her past crash in.

Best-selling poet Cleo Wade emphasized the power of setting intentions and navigating one’s way to success in today’s world at the Aerie REALtreat conference in downtown Los Angeles Saturday morning.

The Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for a Better Life author is also an #AerieREAL role model as she pumped up the audience at Rolling Greens Nursery in the Arts District then joined a panel with fellow ambassadors Olympic gymnast and Fierce: How Competing for Myself Changed Everything author Aly Raisman and body-positive model Iskra. Aerie is the intimate apparel lifestyle offshoot of American Eagle Outfitters.

Using advice from her book, Cleo said one of her intentions is to exude kindness when she’s most stressed.

“Another one I have is: Can I be patient? Can I not make rushing everyone else’s problem?” she said. “I’m sure you’re all familiar when you’re the one running late, but then all of sudden it’s the Uber driver’s problem if they’re not going fast enough. And then you’re like, ‘I have to be there in 10 minutes,’ if like you needing to be there in 10 minutes has to do with whether or not it’s 20 minutes away or not, and that is somehow their fault.”

Several of the estimated 100 women in attendance in Cleo’s speaking session went up to the decorated stage to share their intentions. Cleo said she requested Aerie put notebooks and pens in the giveaway bags to do the five-minute, intention-writing exercise.

“For me, intentions are a space where we can say I know I have these default settings as the person I am, but what does it look like for me to carve out the person I know I can be,” Cleo said. “That’s what we really do when we set intentions for ourselves.”

In partnership with Create & Cultivate (disclosure: I’m an insider), the event focused on tapping into women’s power for entrepreneurial success, so Cleo brought up the theme of making connections.

“If you’re someone who doesn’t like to be the first to walk up to someone to say like, ‘Your hair looks really amazing today’ or ‘I love your scarf,’ or ‘Hi, my name is Cleo,’ then maybe your intention for today is ‘I’m going to be the first to say hello,'” she said. “If you came here today, like so many of you I’m sure did, it’s such a beautiful and safe space to create fellowship and participate in sisterhood and make new friends then maybe your intention today is, ‘I am going to be open enough to allow connection to take place between me and another sister I walk or sit next to today.'”

She then had the attendees hug the woman sitting next to them with an introduction. The session ended with her reading a poem from her book while sitting on the edge of the stage.

Joining Aly and Iskra in the next panel, Cleo discussed how many use the internet to connect and grow a brand but recommended to be cautious of what works or won’t work for you.

“Before you endorse anything, there are people who are working with you, for you, not for how many people follow you or how many people’s eyeballs are on what you see or do,” she said. “And you do that by getting to know brands or people before you work with them, so that they are there for your voice, they are there for your story, they are there for the way that you have built your community rather than anyone reducing you to a number or anyone reducing you to an algorithm.”

And with so many connections, the act of gluing the connections can become stressful to the point where slowing down may be the best option.

“I think in that space it’s always OK if you allow yourself to not be Superwoman. I always say with the women who work with me, it’s like I don’t want to be Superwoman because she’s not real,” Cleo said. “That has to be OK because that’s the truth. So when it comes to whether having the answer or that one piece of advice—if I don’t have that, I don’t put pressure on myself to have that.”

Aly later said as the main takeaway she wanted to share with audience was partly inspired by Cleo’s book, and that’s to be “authentically you.”

“Know your value and what you want in your life,” she said. “If you are willing to, I would recommend when you leave here, or when you feel like it, to really take time and really get to know what you want and who you want to be with… I think it’s about really knowing your value and really getting to know what makes you happy.”

Cleo co-signed actively surrounding ourselves with people who support us with recalling a moment she shared with her brother in their mother’s kitchen one day in Louisiana. After realizing it would’ve been a good anecdote in her book, she said her mother was cooking food in a pan when she and her brother mentioned “haters.”

“She looks up from the pan and says, ‘Haters? What are haters? I have no idea who hates me. I don’t hang out with those people.’ I always think of that as some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten because you’re like, ‘Exactly!'” Cleo said. “Sometimes, I don’t think we realize we’re moving in this world looking for people to criticize us because we don’t believe in our own power and we don’t believe in our own place in the world. We actually look around whether it’s on the internet or in social spaces for people who might reject us or tell us we’re not enough.”

The panel ended with Aly having the audience engage in a 10-minute meditation rather than the originally scheduled fitness workout.