Review: "Body Grammar" by Jules Ohman

Body Grammar by Jules Ohman
Published 2022 via Vintage
★★★★

Jules has the genes to be a model, or so the scouts tell her. She's more comfortable behind the camera—until an accident turns things upside-down and she needs a change, and now.

Body Grammar makes for a blunt and raw look at modelling. It's not all bad—Jules makes friends, has some success, learns something about setting limits. But there's not a lot of glamour, either: she's tired and overworked, she has limited say in what she does, she has to learn about setting those limits, and she's still more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it. But I love that this lives in the gritty spaces rather than the sparkly ones, while managing not to be...what's the fiction equivalent of a misery memoir? It seems like so many books about the life of a model default to either 'fancy dresses! and money! and parties! and i'm popular now!' or 'everyone is abusive and this is terrible', when the reality for the vast, vast majority of models will be somewhere in between. This reminds me somewhat of Meat Market—successful model breaking onto the scene, some good and some bad—and I guess now I'd just like to see some of the stories of the girls who move to New York thinking they'll be the next hot thing and end up scrounging for, I don't know, third-rate ad work, struggling to pay their bills and constantly on the brink of being dropped by their agencies. Still, I'd take piles more books like this over the usual uncomplicated fluff pieces. Messy and satisfying.