In long: “She totally missed everything, the truth of who I am, what my impact is. [My husband] was like, ‘It’s just bad. It’s really badly written.’ I was like, ‘OK,'” she complained. “The stuff that I saw in People magazine, and [other outlets that picked it up], it was all rubbish, the things that I supposedly said.” She added: “I think it’s very sexist. I was like, ‘OK, hang on a sec. Why do the men get Walter Isaacson and I get this hack?’ You know?”
The one specific claim in the book Paltrow counters is the idea that her lifestyle company Goop has a “toxic culture”: “Granted we’ve had a couple of toxic people and, because of my fear of confrontation, maybe I didn’t deal with it quickly enough. That does cascade down and I totally take responsibility for that. But we are such a good culture. We are,” she tells Vogue. She does acknowledge that of course, as the head of Goop, of course she’d say that Goop isn’t toxic. Plus, “We are all human beings who go to work, sometimes with unresolved stuff and that comes out. People can have bad work experiences anywhere,” she allows. “But I can guarantee if I dropped you into the Goop office in Santa Monica, you’d be like: ‘What the fuck are these people talking about?’ You would see really engaged, really brilliant, highly collaborative teams who are excited. So I don’t like that kind of stuff—it impacts the team.”
Any negative sentiment directed towards her or her company can have an impact, “because energy is real,” as she explains. “The superstring physicists proved this. A molecule flying towards someone can change direction with intention, with thought behind it. To me it feels real.” Though she’s “pretty good at being able to weather the storms,” Paltrow admits, “sometimes there’s an accumulation of energy that makes me feel pretty fragile. Ultimately I’m just a mammal like anyone, but I’m expected to have this superhuman capacity to body all of this energy and thought.”
