I’m here for that! But are we sure she’s not kinda aware?! I think she trolls herself a smidge.
Gwyneth Paltrow
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I’m here for that! But are we sure she’s not kinda aware?! I think she trolls herself a smidge.
I agree. She plays into it.
Gwyneth: The Biography by Amy Odell is set to be released in the summer of 2025.
I plead guilty to pre-ordering the Kindle version.
I just saw this and maybe I don’t get it….Why her? Just because she was Chris Martins ex??
This must be for massive distraction. I mean the next thing you know she will be schilling her wares on their website......
I thought it was cute! It is meant to be tongue in cheek. I think they are trying to move on by acknowledging that this was a bit of a disaster using good-natured fun that everyone is poking at themself here.
Business: “Nothing to see here!” (But of course there is).
Gwyneth: I think the joke is that she’s the spokesperson because she is a bit overexposed in the public consciousness, so of course she is here, and her connection Chris Martin just makes it more silly.
I was recently thinking that Gwyneth seems to be following the Martha Stewart playbook. Cultured, “perfect” woman who is very popular for a long stretch of time, but also not always well-liked for being performative/not realistic, takes a fall from grace (for very different reasons), then comes back with the same outward elevated vibes as before but with a more chill and non-serious demeanor.
I love Martha now, I think she is powerful and hilarious, super quirky and is the first to laugh at herself, all the while looking amazing and doing wild things like putting Cartier jewelry on her dogs as if it is totally normal!
I see Gwyneth starting to move towards this lane, and I hope that she does!
Business: “Nothing to see here!” (But of course there is).
Gwyneth: I think the joke is that she’s the spokesperson because she is a bit overexposed in the public consciousness, so of course she is here, and her connection Chris Martin just makes it more silly.
I was recently thinking that Gwyneth seems to be following the Martha Stewart playbook. Cultured, “perfect” woman who is very popular for a long stretch of time, but also not always well-liked for being performative/not realistic, takes a fall from grace (for very different reasons), then comes back with the same outward elevated vibes as before but with a more chill and non-serious demeanor.
I love Martha now, I think she is powerful and hilarious, super quirky and is the first to laugh at herself, all the while looking amazing and doing wild things like putting Cartier jewelry on her dogs as if it is totally normal!
I see Gwyneth starting to move towards this lane, and I hope that she does!
Today's Wash Post review of her new biography:
July 27, 2025 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
"Gwyneth Paltrow, once known as an Oscar-winning actress, is perhaps our finest unrelatable relatable. Since 2008, she has promoted the aspirational absurdity that, with an abundance of time and capital (and if you’re feeling daring, a jade egg), women can improve themselves, becoming a tad more like, well, her.
Amy Odell’s dishy, often delicious “Gwyneth: The Biography” charts how Paltrow grew from winsome ingenue to influencer executrix: daughter of actress Blythe Danner and television producer and director Bruce Paltrow, Best Actress Academy Award winner (at age 26, for “Shakespeare in Love”), first lady of Miramax, fashion muse, It girl, girlfriend of GQ cover-worthy swains (Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck, Luke Wilson), wife and ex of Coldplay’s Chris Martin, mogul. She’s the woman who appears to have everything, much of it in navy and beige.
Odell’s previous book, “Anna: The Biography” (2022) about legendary Vogue editor Anna Wintour, concerned another icon who has attracted near obsessive levels of fascination. While Wintour trends cool and private, an enigma in Chanel shades, Paltrow has adopted a girlfriend-y stance — an oversharing seeker of sexual bliss. And yet it was the icy Wintour, Odell writes, who provided her with sources for the previous bio, while Paltrow’s team dithered and stonewalled on this one, fortified by nondisclosure agreements and a staff fearful of retribution. Paltrow did not speak to Odell for this book.
Odell’s take on Paltrow’s early, less-documented years is thin, reliant on tenuous sources. There’s a buffet of mean-girl quotes about a woman who has been beautiful, tall, thin, rich and famous for most of her 52 years, inducing envy from those excised from her inner sanctum. In Upper East Side theatrical productions, where Paltrow attended the exclusive all-girls Spence School, “everybody from the lowliest spear-carrier to the few boys to the upperclassmen were all simultaneously terrified of her and in awe of her and wanted to be with her,” a high school friend said.
Paltrow’s early films, like “Sliding Doors” and “Hook,” were either charming indies or bigger productions that made small use of her. For better and worse, Harvey Weinstein changed all that. After “Shakespeare in Love,” the Miramax honcho used Paltrow’s success as bait to prey on other women. Paltrow was one of the first stars to speak out about Weinstein’s harassment. The trauma of working for him, she is quoted saying here, is one of the reasons she quit acting so young. “I had a really rough boss for most of my movie career at Miramax,” Paltrow said on a podcast during the pandemic. “So you’re like, I don’t know if this is really my calling.” (She has two upcoming movies, including one with Timothée Chalamet.)
The book is strongest on the Goop era: the company’s volatile financial history, and Paltrow’s central role in the factually fungible, potentially dangerous wellness market. (It’s also explored well in Amy Larocca’s “How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time.”)
Paltrow has long been her best product, and selling herself has increasingly overshadowed her considerable acting chops. “Gwyneth has spent her career manipulating her own coverage, and she applied the same savvy to Goop, beating her competitors at their own game,” Odell writes. When she suggested launching a travel app called “G. Spotting,” Paltrow was prepared for the reaction and net result: “Everybody will make fun of me for being an idiot and we’ll have the ten thousand downloads we need right there.”
As for dish, there’s plenty: Paltrow dumped former pal Madonna after the singer “went off on her daughter, Lourdes” at a large gathering, behavior that disgusted Paltrow and Martin, her then husband. The pop star also seemed a bit stalky, showing up without prior notice on the island where they were vacationing. Paltrow told friends that Pitt — her former fiancée — “has terrible taste in women.”
She has long been insulated from anything resembling a normal life. Perhaps that’s why she created a consumer one of her own. For the Paris promotion of “Emma,” Paltrow, all of 24, requested a private plane for an entourage of 10 and the penthouse suite at the Ritz and attendant rooms, and demanded that no other guests stay on that floor. Later, she took to traveling on location with two yoga instructors.
By her own admission, Paltrow “basically stopped making money from acting in 2002.” She lives extravagantly, often fueled by the generosity of sponsors. She is the ambassador and the product. Paltrow’s well-publicized second nuptials to television producer Brad Falchuk, in 2018, featured a bouquet of donated goods and services, documented in a “sourcebook” and promoted in an article on the Goop website: “The Wedding Party: GP x Brad Tie the Knot.” She asked the bathroom firm Waterworks to help outfit a $10 million home with Martin, Odell reports, and Restoration Hardware to furnish her offices and be featured in a six-year rebuild of her latest Montecito home with Falchuk; the design accents are available on the Goop website.
While Paltrow projects intelligence as an actress and has appeared in some cinematic gems (“Shakespeare,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “The Royal Tenenbaums”), she’s made some wretched choices as well, appearing in a string of critical and box-office duds (“Shallow Hal,” “View from the Top”). For all her style and seeming grace, Paltrow has also made some inane utterances, many of them catalogued here. On the benefits of wearing a fat suit in “Shallow Hal”: “I got a real sense of what it would be like to be overweight, and every pretty girl should be forced to do that.” At one Goop leadership meeting, when everyone was asked to share something that wasn’t true of the rest, Paltrow responded, “I won an Oscar.”
Paltrow’s inability to read the room and her remove from lesser mortals was broadcast to the world in her 2023 Park City, Utah, ski-accident trial, where she uttered the Bartlett’s-worthy “Well, I lost a half day of skiing.” (The trial inspired not one but two musicals.)
At Goop, Odell reports, Paltrow repeatedly failed to put in the hard work, or get others to do it for her, including research into dubious wellness claims of products on the website. The quartz and jade eggs ($55 and $66) to be inserted in “your yoni” for “better sex,” based on absolutely nothing, sold out in three hours with thousands on the waitlist. Despite constant criticism from experts, items promoted with unsubstantiated promises long remained on the website.
Paltrow’s gift is selling, but she’s not adept at managing, Odell writes. She won’t delegate, creating an unhealthy work environment marked by frequent churn. Paltrow has a tendency to avoid conflict while rarely hearing anyone tell her no.
Her greatest cultural impact, Odell writes, is “showing the world just how much consumers will spend and how much effort they would undertake for the luxury of being well, no matter what science tells us.” In Goop world, “there wasn’t a lot of tolerance for imperfection,” Odell writes. Which is understandable, as perfection, that impossible, impractical, expensive ideal, is Paltrow’s brand."
Karen Heller is the former national features writer for The Washington Post.
Sorry, you’ll never be Gwyneth Paltrow. Whoever she really is.
Amy Odell’s dishy biography of the actress and wellness guru examines how she became such an inspirational, aspirational and ultimately unknowable iconJuly 27, 2025 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
"Gwyneth Paltrow, once known as an Oscar-winning actress, is perhaps our finest unrelatable relatable. Since 2008, she has promoted the aspirational absurdity that, with an abundance of time and capital (and if you’re feeling daring, a jade egg), women can improve themselves, becoming a tad more like, well, her.
Amy Odell’s dishy, often delicious “Gwyneth: The Biography” charts how Paltrow grew from winsome ingenue to influencer executrix: daughter of actress Blythe Danner and television producer and director Bruce Paltrow, Best Actress Academy Award winner (at age 26, for “Shakespeare in Love”), first lady of Miramax, fashion muse, It girl, girlfriend of GQ cover-worthy swains (Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck, Luke Wilson), wife and ex of Coldplay’s Chris Martin, mogul. She’s the woman who appears to have everything, much of it in navy and beige.
Odell’s previous book, “Anna: The Biography” (2022) about legendary Vogue editor Anna Wintour, concerned another icon who has attracted near obsessive levels of fascination. While Wintour trends cool and private, an enigma in Chanel shades, Paltrow has adopted a girlfriend-y stance — an oversharing seeker of sexual bliss. And yet it was the icy Wintour, Odell writes, who provided her with sources for the previous bio, while Paltrow’s team dithered and stonewalled on this one, fortified by nondisclosure agreements and a staff fearful of retribution. Paltrow did not speak to Odell for this book.
Odell’s take on Paltrow’s early, less-documented years is thin, reliant on tenuous sources. There’s a buffet of mean-girl quotes about a woman who has been beautiful, tall, thin, rich and famous for most of her 52 years, inducing envy from those excised from her inner sanctum. In Upper East Side theatrical productions, where Paltrow attended the exclusive all-girls Spence School, “everybody from the lowliest spear-carrier to the few boys to the upperclassmen were all simultaneously terrified of her and in awe of her and wanted to be with her,” a high school friend said.
Paltrow’s early films, like “Sliding Doors” and “Hook,” were either charming indies or bigger productions that made small use of her. For better and worse, Harvey Weinstein changed all that. After “Shakespeare in Love,” the Miramax honcho used Paltrow’s success as bait to prey on other women. Paltrow was one of the first stars to speak out about Weinstein’s harassment. The trauma of working for him, she is quoted saying here, is one of the reasons she quit acting so young. “I had a really rough boss for most of my movie career at Miramax,” Paltrow said on a podcast during the pandemic. “So you’re like, I don’t know if this is really my calling.” (She has two upcoming movies, including one with Timothée Chalamet.)
The book is strongest on the Goop era: the company’s volatile financial history, and Paltrow’s central role in the factually fungible, potentially dangerous wellness market. (It’s also explored well in Amy Larocca’s “How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time.”)
Paltrow has long been her best product, and selling herself has increasingly overshadowed her considerable acting chops. “Gwyneth has spent her career manipulating her own coverage, and she applied the same savvy to Goop, beating her competitors at their own game,” Odell writes. When she suggested launching a travel app called “G. Spotting,” Paltrow was prepared for the reaction and net result: “Everybody will make fun of me for being an idiot and we’ll have the ten thousand downloads we need right there.”
As for dish, there’s plenty: Paltrow dumped former pal Madonna after the singer “went off on her daughter, Lourdes” at a large gathering, behavior that disgusted Paltrow and Martin, her then husband. The pop star also seemed a bit stalky, showing up without prior notice on the island where they were vacationing. Paltrow told friends that Pitt — her former fiancée — “has terrible taste in women.”
She has long been insulated from anything resembling a normal life. Perhaps that’s why she created a consumer one of her own. For the Paris promotion of “Emma,” Paltrow, all of 24, requested a private plane for an entourage of 10 and the penthouse suite at the Ritz and attendant rooms, and demanded that no other guests stay on that floor. Later, she took to traveling on location with two yoga instructors.
By her own admission, Paltrow “basically stopped making money from acting in 2002.” She lives extravagantly, often fueled by the generosity of sponsors. She is the ambassador and the product. Paltrow’s well-publicized second nuptials to television producer Brad Falchuk, in 2018, featured a bouquet of donated goods and services, documented in a “sourcebook” and promoted in an article on the Goop website: “The Wedding Party: GP x Brad Tie the Knot.” She asked the bathroom firm Waterworks to help outfit a $10 million home with Martin, Odell reports, and Restoration Hardware to furnish her offices and be featured in a six-year rebuild of her latest Montecito home with Falchuk; the design accents are available on the Goop website.
While Paltrow projects intelligence as an actress and has appeared in some cinematic gems (“Shakespeare,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “The Royal Tenenbaums”), she’s made some wretched choices as well, appearing in a string of critical and box-office duds (“Shallow Hal,” “View from the Top”). For all her style and seeming grace, Paltrow has also made some inane utterances, many of them catalogued here. On the benefits of wearing a fat suit in “Shallow Hal”: “I got a real sense of what it would be like to be overweight, and every pretty girl should be forced to do that.” At one Goop leadership meeting, when everyone was asked to share something that wasn’t true of the rest, Paltrow responded, “I won an Oscar.”
Paltrow’s inability to read the room and her remove from lesser mortals was broadcast to the world in her 2023 Park City, Utah, ski-accident trial, where she uttered the Bartlett’s-worthy “Well, I lost a half day of skiing.” (The trial inspired not one but two musicals.)
At Goop, Odell reports, Paltrow repeatedly failed to put in the hard work, or get others to do it for her, including research into dubious wellness claims of products on the website. The quartz and jade eggs ($55 and $66) to be inserted in “your yoni” for “better sex,” based on absolutely nothing, sold out in three hours with thousands on the waitlist. Despite constant criticism from experts, items promoted with unsubstantiated promises long remained on the website.
Paltrow’s gift is selling, but she’s not adept at managing, Odell writes. She won’t delegate, creating an unhealthy work environment marked by frequent churn. Paltrow has a tendency to avoid conflict while rarely hearing anyone tell her no.
Her greatest cultural impact, Odell writes, is “showing the world just how much consumers will spend and how much effort they would undertake for the luxury of being well, no matter what science tells us.” In Goop world, “there wasn’t a lot of tolerance for imperfection,” Odell writes. Which is understandable, as perfection, that impossible, impractical, expensive ideal, is Paltrow’s brand."
Karen Heller is the former national features writer for The Washington Post.
"By her own admission, Paltrow “basically stopped making money from acting in 2002.” She lives extravagantly, often fueled by the generosity of sponsors. She is the ambassador and the product. Paltrow’s well-publicized second nuptials to television producer Brad Falchuk, in 2018, featured a bouquet of donated goods and services, documented in a “sourcebook” and promoted in an article on the Goop website: “The Wedding Party: GP x Brad Tie the Knot.” She asked the bathroom firm Waterworks to help outfit a $10 million home with Martin, Odell reports, and Restoration Hardware to furnish her offices and be featured in a six-year rebuild of her latest Montecito home with Falchuk; the design accents are available on the Goop website."
The rich never spend their own money do they.
I loved Martha when I was a kid in the early 2000s, in her nasty days 🤭 The way she’d talk to Big Martha when she was on her show was kinda cringe, but I still liked her. Please carry on about Gwyneth 😆