Gwyneth Paltrow Enlists Rich Overachievers to Share Tips On Being the Best

by Liz Colville

Today’s GOOP newsletter is an answer to someone’s prayer, which is the field that Gwyneth Paltrow is in. A woman wrote in to Paltrow asking her if she could please explain once and for all how to balance being a mom and working and having a life. Paltrow recruited two ladies she knows — very dear friend Stella McCartney and venture capitalist Juliet de Baubigny — plus herself, with whom she is an acquaintance, to talk about how very, very rich women with jobs and children manage their time, because I suppose what GOOP is, in the end, is a dreamcatcher belonging to someone else, a colorful web hung high upon a hook just out of reach, which ensnares all our wishes to be rich and perfect in someone else’s fine sticky (actually string) threads, then displays it for us to look at and admire, but never touch, though we might yet try, and try again. “Do these crazy things that these crazy ladies do and ye shall inherit not the earth but maybe cash. Ye shall be on the board of a very important charity, because of that cash,” etc.

Juliet de Baubigny, who is a partner at a venture capitalist firm in California, starts her day around 5:30 because this is the only way she can get “me time.” Her “me time” flips the definition of “me” on its head in a depressing yet insidiously familiar way: it involves checking her e-mail on a portable device, then going to the gym, where she reads some feeds — “Facebook, Twitter and categories that are important to me: business, technology, style, design, fashion” — on a slightly larger device that she says she could not live without. She wants you to know that she wouldn’t be able to get to the gym during the week unless she had her trainer show up at her door on Monday mornings. Don’t you have…? No? Moving on to the category of hair.

A great time saver is to have a weekly blow out.

Which is completely free if you have acquired a lot of money, whereupon things that cost a little money start to seem like they cost nothing.

In the category of work:

I have the benefit of an amazing assistant, without whom I could not make it happen.

See above. Also, what is the woman who wrote in to ask the question about work-life balance doing right now, I am beginning to wonder? Is she still alive?

In the category of friendship, de Baubigny says:

I try to organize a girls’ night once a quarter.

“Ladies, how is week one of Q2 looking for you? Let’s be prepared to discuss our previous quarter’s emotional earnings and how we can do better for each other in Q2, specifically how can we give each other better tips on work-life balance.”

Stella McCartney, who is about to have her fourth child, gives a fairly reasonable response, actually, and Gwnyeth’s, while composed in a crazily long paragraph with no breaks and few periods, is also rather normal-sounding, honest, and not full of bragging followed by attempts at modesty. Reader Sarah Koenig suggested we compile an F/M/K for this particular GOOP, and I think, based on the above, we have our answer, though the first one has the potential to be, yes, satisfyingly slapdash, but no fun:

Fuck Gwyneth Paltrow
Marry Stella McCartney
Kill Juliet de Baubigny

See you gals in Q2!