Excerpt. Complete interview on NYT.com here.

The veteran supermodel is contesting the will of her late husband, Ric Ocasek — and writing herself a splashy new chapter.

When the writer and model Paulina Porizkova was asked by Aaron Sorkin to join him at the Oscars for what would be their second real date, she hesitated.

The first had gone well. “He’s a great kisser,” Ms. Porizkova, 56, said on a Zoom call from Los Angeles, in which she had zit cream and an irrepressible smile on her face. But she was concerned it was too soon for red-carpet photographs.

“This is going to kind of take me off the market for a little bit,” she told him.

“OK,” he replied.

A few days later, they did the walk-and-talk (and smile) on the step-and-repeat, then curled up on a banquette for the ceremony in Union Station, holding hands, Ms. Porizkova in a metallic Dolce & Gabbana gown from 15 years ago that she’d happened to pack.

“You’re not there to have fun. You’re on display,” she said once back in the New York apartment that has become a familiar setting for her Instagram communiqués. She was wearing a tank top, workout tights and her hair twisted into two tight buns, sipping coffee with oat milk and a vegan smoothie while considering samples of D.I.Y. wallpaper — and an 18-month roller coaster ride of loss and renewal.

It began in September 2019, when her husband of 30 years, Ric Ocasek, frontman of the Cars, died unexpectedly at 75. A few weeks before, he’d cut her out of his will, which included the intellectual property of his vast music catalog. They were living together during what she said was an amicable divorce.

Since then, Ms. Porizkova has let loose online with raw emotion, unvarnished images and long ruminations on aging, grief, angerand anti-depressants. She hasn’t been this exposed since she was a supermodel in the 1980s and 1990s, posing on the covers of glossy print magazines. Last month, she appeared on the cover of the Czech Republic’s edition of Vogue wearing nothing but a sheer body suit.

Her two sons’ reaction, she said: “There’s Mom, naked again.”

Indeed, “none of this is all that new to me and our family,” said the younger son, Oliver Otcasek, 22. (Ric Ocasek dropped a “T” from his surname as a young singer.) “We already knew what her opinions were and she’s really being herself, she’s just reaching a wider audience. And a human body is just a human body.”

Part of Ms. Porizkova’s appeal has been her head-on confrontation of the ravages that aging confers upon that body. “Grief is certainly no beauty maker. My eyelids are starting to droop,” she wrote in one post, worrying that her “jowly bits” made her look not only older, but “somehow bitter.” But there has been something deeply restorative in scrubbing the gloss from her public image.

“Any truth is less shameful than the secret,” she said

Excerpt. Complete interview on NYT.com here.

Paulina Porizkova, Full-Frontal Emotion / NYT