How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone

October 1, 2023

A Hurston/Wright finalist for Searching for Zion, Raboteau contemplates race, climate change, and social justice as she considers how best to raise children today in Lessons for Survival (100,000-copy first printing). Prepub Alert.

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January 22, 2024
Supermodel and activist Russell catalogs the psychic toll of a career in front of the camera in her candid and confrontational debut. Scouted to model as a naive 16-year-old in 2003, Russell quickly learned that producing the desired poses and reactions for much older photographers resulted in lucrative bookings and referrals, while questions or expressions of discomfort­—in response to intimate touches from strangers, for example, or requests for sexually explicit poses—earned her a reputation as “difficult.” As Russell became more well-known, she grew increasingly eager to please the industry’s gatekeepers and power brokers, compartmentalizing her feelings along the way (“The way to stop reacting is to put the self away so there’s nobody to offend, to blame, to ignore”). Eventually, however, those feelings spilled over, and in the 2010s, Russell began organizing with fellow models to expose abuses of power across the industry. Readers expecting a standard model memoir are likely to be surprised by Russell’s forceful style and devastating revelations, which recall the frankness of Julia Fox’s Down the Drain. It’s an impressive and illuminating dispatch from the front lines of the fashion industry. Agent: Caroline Eisenmann, Frances Goldin Literary.

February 1, 2024
A model and activist breaks a self-imposed silence about her professional life to examine the dark underside of the fashion industry. When Russell began modeling at 16, she was unaware that she was entering a world where a woman's value was based as much on looks as on a willingness to "do anything" for (male) photographers. Her first experiences rejecting an S&M-style shoot confused her not only because of the photographer's annoyed response but also because of her inability to make him understand that the pictures might jeopardize a future career in politics. Russell soon realized that if she was going to become a successful model, she would need to let "the photographer feel he control[ed]" her. However, the intimacy she performed as a model often left her open to unwanted advances from photographers and their clients, who treated models as "disposable" sexual commodities. Over time, she became a "good actress" and learned to play the game, scoring lucrative contracts with the likes of Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren that allowed her to pay for a college education at Columbia. Unable to ignore the abuses of power she saw in her work, Russell began to speak out, first through a TED Talk about "Whiteness, beauty [and] privilege." Later, she helped found the Model Mafia, a collective in which models could discuss their experiences within a brutal system that exploits girls and young women who, unlike the (largely white) supermodels celebrated by the media, lived "far from family [and made] less than a livable wage." Intimate and thoughtful, Russell's book offers a disturbing look at the hidden ways women are objectified and degraded in an industry that profits from creating illusions of beauty that feed an endless--and damaging--circle of misogynist desire. A sharp, provocative memoir about an evergreen topic.

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March 1, 2024
Modeling was not the career path Russell expected to pursue, but after she was ""discovered"" as a teenager, the fashion world became a defining component of her life. However, the exceptional money and freedom it offered often came at the cost of her autonomy and ethics. Russell addresses several chapters of this memoir directly to those who shaped her experience: her mother, the invisible yet all-seeing audience, and the exploitative men who dominate the industry. Russell's writing style evolves as she does; when describing her youth as a model, she writes her memories with the introspection and detail of a coming-of-age novel. As she grows older and her political ambitions solidify (early on, she dreams of being both a supermodel and the U.S. president), her writing becomes more academic. Her activism largely focuses on labor organizing and sexual violence within the fashion industry. As one of the field's most well-known critics, she offers a thoughtful examination of its intersections of beauty, violence, and desire.

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