Ticket 2 Ride

I presumed there is a lot to learn about this uptown girl, though I was really interested in her Billy Joel years. Christie Brinkley: Uptown Girl (2025, HarperCollins) is a mostly light, breezy summer read. It’s also cliched and monotonous, and quickly steers the reader into “love lives of rich and famous” territory. Where’s Robin Leach when you need him?

There’s no denying that Brinkley has led a charmed and interesting life, enjoying the fruits of success being at the top of the modeling profession. The book reads like a schoolgirl’s diary, probably because that what it evolved from. The list of photo shoots and parties around the world quickly gets boring, maybe because it reads like it’s no big deal, just another day in the life. I do imagine posing on beaches in swimsuits is exhausting, and earning big checks is heavy lifting. We should all be so challenged. To be fair, Brinkley breathes rarified air in that strata, a place only a few can truly relate.

The beginning of the book deals with a difficult early childhood, an abusive father who basically gave up his kids. Thankfully, a kind and loving man entered the picture, marrying her mother and providing a solid and supportive life for Brinkley and her brother. There’s a lot of superficiality in this book, but I suspect that Brinkley is much wiser than she lets on. With the focus on the glamour, glitz and her four failed marriages, it’s too bad that Brinkley sets the bar so low.

Honestly, I knew little of Brinkley’s modeling career, nor her years living in Paris working as an artist. You look at Brinkley and you assumed her life must have been easy, happy and always the best of everything. How could this incredibly beautiful and successful woman ever have a bad day. Well, she tells us so. Behind the smile, the sexy magazine photos, modeling assignments around the globe, the designer clothes, the A list parties, there was a lot of heartache in her life. Her trouble usually stemmed from the men in her life: father, boyfriends, husbands and model agency executives.

What did I think of the section on Billy Joel? It was disappointing; what began as a dream romance, turned into a relationship of alcoholism and infidelity – at least that’s Brinkley’s version. She indicated that Joel knew what she was going to write about him and he was okay with it. There seems to be something missing in the story, I don’t know what, but I’m starting to read a bio on him.

Christie Brinkley has led a fairytale life, with the exception of four divorces, a lover who died, and surviving a helicopter crash into a mountain. All of that should have made a tremendous read. With a co-writer and a big publishing house behind her, why is this much a boring book to read? It doesn’t take a hundred pages to become disconnected from this book. The publisher obviously wanted a book in Brinkley’s chatty, style-over-substance approach, rather than a more insightful, tightly edited read. This book is like eating a meal of very sweet treats. At first, it’s delicious and satisfies the sweet tooth, then you are filled up on empty calories, become slightly nauseous, and wonder why you couldn’t stop.