Getting Naked: The Quiet Work of Becoming Perfectly Imperfect

Valerie Bertinelli has been on television since she was a teenager, and she’s been a subject of public commentary about her weight and appearance for nearly as long. Getting Naked covers her complicated relationship with her own body across those decades—the diets, the periods of losing and gaining weight, the ways the entertainment industry made those fluctuations into news stories. She writes about the psychology of diet culture with more precision than most celebrity wellness books manage, drawing on her own experience and on the work of researchers who study body image and disordered eating. The naked of the title is metaphorical; she’s writing about exposure and vulnerability rather than weight loss. The book doesn’t offer a program or a before-and-after. It argues instead that the framework of fixing the body is itself the problem, which is a harder position to sell in a culture that profits from it.