Gwyneth & Goop

[GeneChing]

Guests attending a reiki workshop at Goop’s wellness summit. Tickets to past summits have ranged from $500 to $4,500.Credit Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

We talked about this one morning at a suite at the Carlyle, where she lay across a sofa like a poem. She wasn’t wearing shoes. (I had taken to, when barefoot, extending the sesamoid part of my foot without pointing my toes, so that my feet looked like Barbie feet, which created an arch where I had none. “See?” I’d say to my husband in bed. “This is what her feet look like just regular.”)

She didn’t know why people felt the way they did. She said the decision to stop acting and pursue Goop was not difficult, but it had nothing to do with her reputation. “I really liked acting,” she told me. “But at a certain point, it started to feel frustrating in a way not to have true agency, like to be beholden to other people to give you a job, or to create something, to put something into the world.” She was doing three or four or five movies a year, and the primary relationship in those films was with Harvey Weinstein. “The one time that Harvey propositioned me was really almost the least of it in terms of how onerous that relationship was, and it was very quid pro quo and punitive, and I always felt like I was on thin ice, and he could be truly horrible and mean and then be incredibly generous. It was kind of like a classic abusive relationship.”

When she and Chris Martin separated via something that they called “conscious uncoupling,” she was blindsided by the backlash. What people heard, she thinks, was that even her divorce was going to be better than theirs. “I was really saying we’re in a lot of pain, we failed at this; we’re going to try and do it in a different way. But I was so raw that I didn’t anticipate.” She trailed off. “I think that was an instance where it really hit me that an insouciance with language from me is different than from somebody else.”

What can she say? It’s hard to talk about herself like this. How can she really understand who she is in the culture anyway? She’s the only one who can’t see herself clearly. All she knows is what she hears, and she once heard that she eats in front of the mirror naked.

The hatred used to feel personal to her, but it doesn’t anymore. Now it feels as if she’s watching a soap opera. She remembers the week that Star Magazine called her the most hated celebrity in the world. “I remember being like: Really? More than, like, Chris Brown? Me? Really? Wow. It was also the same week that I was People’s Most Beautiful Woman. For a minute I was like: Wait, I don’t understand. Am I hated to the bone or am I the world’s most beautiful?”

Anyway, this was an old conversation, she insisted. “I really notice as the business grows, there’s a lot less of that, and I think people are like: Oh, this is real, and I feel like that’s sort of, you know, a nine-months-ago story. You know what I mean?”

I didn’t. I was introduced to G.P. through Bill Burton, a communications strategist known for his work for Barack Obama. That’s not really how stories about start-ups or celebrities typically get done. I have a Google alert for her (as I do for everyone I’m writing about), and each day, that alert goes off and is somewhat filled with pictures of her in a bikini on a yacht but is mostly filled with pus and bile — for her supposed smugness, her jade eggs, her ability to smoke a cigarette without becoming an addict. Bloggers at New York magazine’s The Cut regularly mock Goop’s gift guides (to which G.P. said, “I don’t know what The Cut is”).

So this is why people hate her? “Because I have discipline?” she said. She remembers reading that Michio Kushi, the father of macrobiotics, smoked cigarettes sometimes. She wanted to be like that. It’s something she cultivated.

I said, don’t you see? The last cigarette she had was in February, sitting on the floor next to her chimney with me. It was June. I smoked now. I walked down the street sucking on cigarettes the way I did in my youth. I recently got into bed with my poor son, and he told me that I “smell like the city.”

She doesn’t understand it. She doesn’t think she’s perfect. She is the way she is because of hard work. How could people hate her for that? It’s just hard work. It’s just intention. The content is free, and it’s all right there. Go to her website. Do some meditation. Just eat more produce. Take some time for yourself. Hydrate.

We’re so hard on one another, G.P. said. We’re so hard on ourselves, too. “That’s all we do as women,” she said. “We just kick the [expletive] out of ourselves. It’s like that inner critic is so vicious, and it’s like: Why do we do that? It’s so nuts.” She continued: “People say that there’s no link between emotions and consciousness and physical illness. And yet look at the plethora of autoimmune diseases around you. One man to 10 women have autoimmune. We literally have turned on ourselves.”

The In Goop Health summit was perhaps the most gracefully and elegantly executed event I’ve ever been to. There was food everywhere — small plates of ancient grains and salads and not a brown avocado in the bunch. There was keto food (which create ketones), vegan food (which doesn’t use animal products), paleo food (made out of, I don’t know, dinosaurs). Syringes of CBD oil. Coffee with pea milk. Nothing was rushed. Everything was plentiful. Somewhere during my reporting, I had stopped thinking about food deserts and people who didn’t even have access to ancient grains.

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[GeneChing]

Gwyneth Paltrow’s $250 million company started out as a newsletter of recommendations.Credit Amanda Demme for The New York Times

Everyone glowed. Everyone wore flowing dresses and wide-legged jumpsuits. There was a woman asleep on one of the couches. Also: a manifestation workshop; acroyoga, where we bobbed up and down on scarves hanging from the ceiling; a medium who told me my grandmother was standing next to me telling me I have thyroid disease; a man who stuck two ungloved fingers into my ears and said he “fixed” my jaw, which there was nothing wrong with. Trust him, he said, he’s not a doctor. He’s not even a physical therapist. He’s a weight trainer, and he said he has a list of 2,000 people waiting to get fixed by him. All these people, wasting their money on traditional medicine, when he’s willing to take you into his office and lay you on a table and make you good as new without the hassle of insurance.

This always struck me as funny about the wellness world: how some people would brag about their mainstream credentials (“Trust me,” they’d say, with a straightening of their tie. “I’m a doctor”), while others felt that their legitimacy lay in the fact that they had no credentials. (“Trust me,” they’d say, jamming their thumbs mockingly toward the doctors. “I’m not a doctor.”)

I pulled down my pants for a man in scrubs who was giving out B12 shots, never telling him my secret, that I’d been taking the Goop vitamins and my urine was already a fluorescent yellow — no, gold — a superfood elixir.

A woman called an akashic-records healer who reads your past, present and possible future lives sat me down and asked about my foot pain. I asked her how she knew I had foot pain. I wasn’t limping. She said, “You have flat feet.” I nodded, incredulous. “I do,” I said. “I have flat feet.” She told me that 13 lives ago, my feet were chopped off as punishment for a crime. As a result, since then, whenever I reincarnate (which is every 100 to 500 years because I like to rest between incarnations), my feet are flat because I like the surety of them entirely touching the ground.

What I’m saying is: There was nothing that couldn’t be healed at the summit.

The next morning, I had another article to write. But my hotel was on the beach, and the ocean was just a block away. I still had a bottle of Madame Dry Rose Water, which is “botanically infused, positively charged” water that is filtered through rose-quartz crystals, and a bottle of Lifewtr, which is just water without vowels. I thought, for maybe the first time in my life, that work could wait. Self-care. Wellness. It started now. I had a long trip home ahead of me, and now I was someone who said “self-care.”

I walked down to the beach with my waters. I sat on a bench as I drank them. I became buoyant with hope. I could feel my posture straightening. I was so free of anxiety and so full of forward motion. I couldn’t remember feeling that way ever before. I could do this, I thought. I could change. I could be someone who pursued only the best. The ocean air. The sand. The sky. All the wellness, it was mine. I could stop smoking. I could exercise. I could hydrate. Look at all the kinds of waters we have! Look at all the kinds of moisturizer! All the ingredients, all of them so beautiful. Everything beautiful, lovely and clean. What if you could pay the price — time, intention, a serious allocation of funds — and make it all this way? I could. I would.

I finished my waters and headed to the airport, where I dropped my rental car and boarded the Hertz bus. But something was wrong at the airport, or it was just Los Angeles being Los Angeles, and the bus didn’t move. The normally 10-minute ride was now 20, and then 30, and then 40. I had to go to the bathroom so badly. My terminal was at the end and there was a stop at every single other terminal — even Air China. At 50 minutes, I realized I could no longer hold it and alerted the bus driver. Someone suggested I just get off at the next terminal and then pick the next bus up again. I screamed that I couldn’t! I didn’t have time! My kids and husband were waiting for me!

Finally, I got off two terminals early. I ran through the check-in area, screaming: “Where’s the bathroom? Where’s the bathroom?” I peed my beautiful pee wondering what the point of it all had been. I ran through the next two terminals till I finally got to the United check-in area. I cut the line, screaming still, “I was on a Hertz bus for an hour!”

I dropped off my suitcase just before the cutoff. I ran through the airport, my new smoker’s cough slowing me down. I went through security but didn’t have time to get something to eat at the fancy place, and so I got a premade fried chicken sandwich, which I would eat and feel every preservative and every sodium molecule course through my blood.

As I was boarding, my sister called me.

“How was it?” she asked.

The image of the reiki workshop I’d gone to at the summit returned to me. The practitioner had us lie on the floor and announced that we were all sharing one another’s energy, and I didn’t know how to feel about that, as if I hadn’t consented to it. She said, “The future is your best teacher.” She waved her hands over us like a sorceress. She gave us each a charged rose crystal that was shaped like a heart but flat and told us to put it in our bras. At the end, we lay, eyes closed, and put our hands on our hearts, and I opened my eyes before everyone else and saw all these women dressed in light colors, lined up like desperate, exquisite corpses, their hands over their hearts, totally inert.

We are doomed to aspire for the rest of our lives. Aspiration is suffering. Wellness is suffering. As soon as you level up, you greet how infinite the possibilities are, and it all becomes too awful to live without.

I told her, “It was ridiculous.”

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for the magazine and a writer for The Times’s culture desk. She last wrote for the magazine about the author Jonathan Franzen.

I never put together the meaning of goop before. brilliant.