If your life was a film, which movie would it be? Also please can everyone stop taking Ozempic?
Certain films have had a big influence on my life, but I'm still trying to figure out which one I'm living in now. And Ozempic? Just say no.
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about Ozempic lately, as I keep being startled by pictures of people who have been taking it, and I wanted to talk to you about it, because it’s freaking me out. Ozempic face is everywhere and is a very real thing: that strange, slightly stricken look of someone who has rapidly lost a lot of weight and no longer looks… quite themselves. It’s rampant in America, especially when you look at images of people on the red carpet, or in media shots, who suddenly look weirdly, scarily, unnaturally, skinny, all clavicles and shoulder blades and huge heads. No-one is supposed to be as skinny as they get on Ozempic, especially in mid-life, when some slightly fuller, curved lines, are definitely more flattering than sharp angles and hollow cheeks.
Botox used to have the same effect, of making a familiar face look suddenly a bit too smooth, too plumped, too glossy and eggy. And just as I’m convinced Botox doesn’t make you look better or younger, just makes you look like you’re injecting Botox, I don’t think that the thinness that comes with Ozempic is very flattering either. It just makes you look like you’re taking Ozempic. Of course, anyone can do anything they want with their own body, but personally I am feeling really confused by the fact we’re living at a time when The Global Hunger Index calculates that 35% of the world cannot afford a healthy diet, yet in America at least, one in 8 of the adult population is taking weight loss drugs, which can cost as much as $500 a month. There’s something so grim about the idea that, while every single day, 25,000 people die, including 10,000 children, die from starvation, while another part of the population enjoys such extreme abundance, they have to inject themselves to control it. Don’t get me started on food waste, either.
Look, I know that weight is a massively complex issue, and I am not dismissing that, and neither am I going to get into the complexities of it here, and why or why not someone might want to use Ozempic or another weight loss drug, but there’s something very wrong in the way we live now that these statistics are real life. I have no answers, but every time I see an Ozempic face I’m reminded of these stats, and feel troubled.
Thinking about Ozempic, and the things we do or do not do to feel better about ourselves, has also made me think a lot about what it means to be yourself, and more specifically, feel yourself. And as I walk around the streets of Washington DC, something I do for almost an hour every morning while walking Pablo, I’m usually analysing my feelings; and because I’m living in America, which does often feel like walking into a movie, I quite often try to work out which film version of my life I’m living in right now, to help me understand it all more clearly.
You know that feeling, don’t you? That feeling when you imagine certain periods, or eras, or days, or even moments, as scenes that might fit into a familiar film? It’s not just me, is it, who finds an affinity, or reassurance, or perhaps an inspiration, by imagining yourself living right inside a film you love?
It first happened to me when I was about seven years old and I watched National Velvet. I didn’t want to be the sapphire-eyed Elizabeth Taylor, but I did want to be Velvet Brown. I wanted a stables right beside the house, and I wanted a trainer to teach me to ride, like the young Mickey Rooney taught Velvet, and I definitely wanted to cut my hair short like a boy, and ride in a race wearing pink and yellow silks. And I didn’t just want that, or dream of it, but I really felt it, and imagined I was her. Later, when I rode my own pony, imagining I was Velvet Brown made me feel like a braver, better rider and a stronger more wilful girl.
A bit later after that, when I was a young teenager and starting to feel the power of being an adolescent girl, I watched West Side Story, and I imagined myself in a colourful dancing dress, in a gym, falling wildly in love with someone I couldn’t really have. Later in my teenage life I watched The Commitments, and it had such a strong effect on me that quickly after, I left school and moved to Dublin because I wanted to inhabit the landscape I’d read about and watched in that film, and also The Van and The Snapper.
I haven’t been to Ireland so much recently, but the scene in Dublin in the 1990s was absolutely tiny, and wild, and wholly immersive. I worked as a waitress for a bit in a restaurant owned by U2, where I was the world’s most inefficient waitress. I have the utmost respect for waiting staff as it’s a fiercely difficult job, and I hated it, but I really, really loved Dublin. Walk down Grafton Street, and instantly you’d be in a bar smashing glasses with Ronnie Wood or asking the late, great, great Dolores O’Riordan for a lighter. And I was surprised and delighted that life in Dublin felt exactly like The Commitments, and even more so when I started going out with one of actors from the band. That was fun! Probably most of Dublin had gone out with one of The Commitments, to be honest, but I was 18 and it was a laugh. After a bit, though, I wanted a bit less urban grit and a bit more of a sense of the wagons and campfires of the movie Into the West in my life, so I hitchhiked to Galway where I walked into a pub and met a big gang of horse-drawn travellers. They were exactly who I was looking for, so I lived with them for a few months, started buying and selling black and white ponies and living in a horse-drawn wagon, and never went back to Dublin.
Other films have fit in to different moments of my life, and some of those films have inspired me to make some of the biggest decisions of my life, too. The film that’s undoubtedly had the biggest effect on me, and is responsible, I think, for the fact I had five kids and became a writer, is