EVERYONE'S SEEN MY TITS

A tabloid fixture writes of an objectified life.

Hazell, a famed “topless titty model,” grew up under desperately poor circumstances, living in public housing with an abusive father and disconnected mother. So emotionally distant was her father that, in childhood, Hazell fantasized that her real father was soccer star David Beckham, of whom, she allows, “it didn’t occur to me that David Beckham would have been only eleven when I was born.” Leaving school as a young teenager, written off as a failure even though, as she says, “I’m just obsessed with knowing things,” she employed her beauty in a way that brought her both plenty of money and a crisis of conscience. Of her early experiences as a topless model, a fixture of British tabloids, she writes, “I hated how I looked. I hated the attention it rendered.” Yet the money was amazing for a child of the council flats—“my grand ‘fuck you’ to my teachers”—which she used for two things: eating gourmet meals she never could have afforded before and attending night classes in law and psychology, as well as real estate (“Why? Because I could”). Things took a turn with a terrible accident that resulted in a wave of surgeries, but it didn’t diminish her popularity. Neither did another turn, the release of a sex tape by her ex, which crushed her—just as did the fact that, an aspiring actor, she would not get to play herself in the hit series Ted Lasso: “I thought watching someone else play Keeley on TV was going to kill me, and that was an understatement. Death would have been easier.” Happily, having had the realization that “glamour modeling was just class oppression transmuted into sexual objectification,” she’s turned to writing instead, and this book makes a fine start.

An often rueful, emotionally involving story of beauty “turned into a monetizable commodity.”