Why we need to let go of the myth of celebrity authenticity

Years ago, I had a conversation with three of my favorite CNN makeup artists who couldn’t stop raving about Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis.

I was genuinely puzzled.

“She’s so real. She’s authentic,” they said, trying to convince me to read her book. “She’s a mom, a wife, and a successful businesswoman who somehow manages it all.”

I tried to explain that this was almost certainly impossible. “You need to understand that celebrities are usually telling a story,” I said. “It’s a story they know will connect with people, leaving out the parts that won’t. Sometimes these stories are completely fabricated, but more often, they’re narratives the celebrities themselves have bought into.”

They were outraged. How could I suggest their beloved Rachel wasn’t genuine?

These women were not naifs. They had famous people sitting in their makeup chair all day long. I pointed out how differently so many of these people were privately versus on television, or how their personalities shifted depending on the situation or who they were talking to. How so often they would espouse values or beliefs on television that were at odds with how they lived, and that they never pretended to believe in real life.

No, it’s not the same, they insisted. They were sure Rachel was in a different category.

Sometime later, one of them texted me: “You were right.” She was furious. She’d shelled out her hard-earned money for Rachel’s marriage boot camp, only to have Rachel and her husband announce their divorce weeks later. The basic math was damning: they weren’t just selling marriage advice while their relationship unraveled; they’d been building a brand on a fiction for years.

I felt no satisfaction in being right. I would have preferred to be wrong.

The sad irony is that many purveyors of life wisdom often are unable to practice what they preach.

Your favorite happiness guru is likely miserable. The relationship expert’s marriage is probably a disaster. The internationally famous spiritual teacher holds grudges and has a vindictive streak. The person who preaches the slow life just cut you off in traffic.

I know this because I know (or have a close friend who knows) many of the people who are idolized in our culture and treated as gurus. If you spend any time with these people the first thing that strikes you is how they don’t even try to align their lives with their public image. The stories they tell publicly have a kernel of truth, but have been jacked up to fit whatever narrative they are selling in the name of authenticity.

There’s a reason they say you should never meet your heroes.

This dynamic came into sharp focus recently when The Cut ran an excerpt of Elizabeth Gilbert’s upcoming memoir. The beloved Eat, Pray, Love author recounted a descent into alcohol and drug abuse—weed, Xanax, psilocybin, sleeping pills—and eventual role as scorer of cocaine, which she helped her dying wife shoot into her veins.

When Gilbert comes to terms with her role as a codependent and love addict, the problematic solution she lands on is to abandon her drug addled, cancer ridden wife in an apartment they are being evicted from. It’s likely the last months of her wife’s life, but unless she stops using drugs Gilbert tells her she’s on her own to find a new place to live.

To many readers, these revelations were shocking because they were so discordant with the image of Gilbert and her wife’s relationship as it played out in public.

Author Elizabeth Gilbert

I wasn’t surprised by Gilbert’s revelations because I operate under the assumption that when celebrities share in the name of authenticity they often aren’t telling the whole story. It could be because it isn’t commercially viable or because they often don’t know the whole story themselves.

In Gilbert’s case, the most generous assumption is that she was telling the story that she believed was true at the time. By her account in the excerpt, it wasn’t until she hit rock bottom with her dying wife that she comes to see something she didn’t see clearly before: she was driven by an frantic need to fill an empty void inside herself. She thought she could do that through external validation and love from other people.

You can fill your love addiction through relationships, which Gilbert did in the extreme, but you can also do it through seeking fame and public attention. I don’t know if Gilbert mines that factor, but many people purse fame because they need approval and attention on a scale that a healthy person would not need or desire.

In an interview, the Swiss-born philosopher Alain de Bottom noted that, “A marker of good parenting is that your child doesn’t want to be famous.”

He added:

This is a good sign…that they have an internal system of validation rather than an external system of validation. They are not seeking to be known by strangers. They can be content to be known by a small circle of people that they actually know back.¹

This reminds me of something that a friends’ father told him: “The world does not move forward on the shoulders of well adjusted people.”

Looking at my own trajectory, I recognize that my greatest professional success and media visibility (which was minuscule compared to Gilbert’s worldwide success) coincided with my most psychologically fragmented periods. Today, having done considerable inner work, I don’t have the same relentless drive to pursue that level of career intensity.

When you begin to heal, something fundamental shifts. That ravenous hunger for external approval—the very engine that fuels the grueling work required to reach and maintain status—dissipates. The irony is stark: the healthier you become, the less desire and energy you have to pursue the very thing that our culture celebrates as the ultimate achievement.

I think the real lesson from celebrity culture’s repeated failures is that nothing external will fill the void inside us. Not children, not success, not fame, not even being Elizabeth Gilbert. Healing is an inside job, and that’s difficult to accept because inner work is genuinely hard.

It’s much easier to look outside ourselves for stability, meaning, and identity. But every fallen or tarnished guru should remind us that if even the most celebrated, successful, and seemingly self-aware people are struggling.

As far as I’ve come, I would never say the struggle is over for me. Yes, I’ve let go of the obsession with work, but there is still so much to deconstruct around what I believe gives me value. That’s what I’m doing in Italy.

While much of my time here has been wonderful, coming face to face with myself without all the external props I once depended on for stability has brought the same discomfort and anxiety I imagine one feels during withdrawal from alcohol or drugs. Stripped of the familiar anchors of career and social status I’m learning what remains when those crutches are gone.

The path to wholeness doesn’t run through celebrity worship or guru following. It runs through the much harder work of looking within, accepting our own contradictions, and doing the slow, unglamorous work of genuine self-discovery.

Maybe it’s time to stop seeking heroes altogether and start becoming our own.

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Alain de Bottom on kids and fame

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