Elle Macpherson is opening up about her past struggles with alcohol and bulimia.
In her new book Life, Lessons & Learning to Trust Yourself released Tuesday, the Australian supermodel, 60, got candid about struggling with alcohol addiction even right after giving birth to her second son Cy, 21.
“My life looked amazing to everybody. On the outside I was doing a beautiful job but, deep down inside, I was really struggling,” she wrote, per Page Six.
The author detailed how the addiction unfolded with her anxiety issues mounting, noting that it piled up due to her elder son Flynn’s frequent hospital visits and her then-partner Arpad ‘Arki’ Busson’s frequent travels.
And when she was gifted a bottle of champagne following her 2003 delivery, her naturopaths advised her against drinking soon after birth as her hormones would “be all over the place.” Despite the warning, she confessed, “All I could think about was that bottle of champagne in the ice bucket” while holding her newborn in her arms.
“In the evenings, after I put him to bed, I’d find myself relaxing with a vodka,” she wrote, detailing a revelation made in an AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meeting.
As Macpherson admitted to being in a “horrible downward spiral” trying to balance her relationship, motherhood, and work, the supermodel recalled a desperate attempt to drink from a shattered bottle of vodka—which she referred to as her breaking point.
“I hurriedly poured myself a shot that could have been littered with shards of glass. And I drank it,” she later recalled in AA.
Macpherson considered going to rehab following the 2000 Olympics in Sydney where she had to cancel partaking in the closing ceremony as she’d “drunk enough champagne or vodka to calm my nerves that it had disoriented me.”
Arki also discouraged Macpherson from going to rehab, she wrote. “I think he was afraid. He didn’t want me to be away from him and I think he was also afraid of change.”
Besides her relationship with alcohol, Macpherson also detailed her breast cancer diagnosis and her decision to forego chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer.
“Every day I actively, deliberately feed my wellness and nurture myself,” she mentioned in her book. “Cancer is not an option for me anymore. Like drinking is not an answer for me.”
