The novel – which resulted from Hazelwood’s inexplicable belief that modeling was “much darker and more pathetic than it’s typically portrayed” – features such shocking (shocking!) topics like drugs!  Eating disorders!  Skeezy older men hitting on nubile younger women! (um … Gia anyone?)

I sat down with the (obviously) statuesque Hazelwood, who was “surprised at the extent that people – even at a school like Yale – were intrigued” with her unique extracurricular. Ultimately, she explains, “Yale and modeling kinda negated each other.”  Tough life, eh?

Here, her thoughts on a few model-slash-student issues:

On modeling while in college:  “Before I went to Yale, I was like, ‘Ohmygosh, I’m entering this intellectual bastion – at lunch people are going to talk about Proust and Nietzsche.  No one can know you’re a model!’  The secret got out, of course.”

On sacrifice: “I did sacrifice – I wasn’t really drinking a lot of beers around the keg.  I mean, I would go to parties but I would be, like, drinking water.  That was sorta lame.”

On trying not to intimidate people: “I bent over backward to be super nice and self-deprecating and I definitely dressed slobbily.  I wouldn’t even look in the mirror in the bathroom.  I felt like everybody was watching me like ‘She’s so vain, she actually stared at herself in the mirror!’ And I wasn’t telling people I was jetting off to the Caribbean or Tahoe.  It just doesn’t go over that well, you know?”

On collegiate jealousy:  “Girls told me that their boyfriends had said I was hot.  I would feel bad – their boyfriends were jerks!  I guess they were thinking I was a bitch for being the one their boyfriend said was hot.  That was a weird dynamic.”

On being the dangers of hawking tampons:  “As a model, you think twice about doing a feminine product commercial, but I was leaving the business so I didn’t care how it might affect my reputation.  It never occurred to me that it might affect my reputation at school too!  Playtex ran that commercial constantly. I would have guys coming up to me in the hallway saying, ‘Umm, I saw your ad on television.’  They would turn all red and stammer, so I would say, ‘Oh. For Playtex.’ And they would nod, relieved that they didn’t have to utter the T word.”

What the modeling world thought of Yale:  “No one cared!  In modeling, you can’t really win going to school.  The fact that it was Yale or any school didn’t really matter.  The whole time I was modeling it was just an incessant drumbeat to get me to quit.”

On men: “By default, I got the more aggressive and obnoxious guys because they’re the ones who have the confidence to ask me out.  The jerk comes up and monopolizes your time – so even if a nice guy was going to take a chance, they’re not going to.  Then there are the Model-Fuckers – they chase after you down the street and hand you their card – they’re like ‘Call me, Call me, Call me.’  And you’re just like, ‘You’re such a loser.’”

Name-dropping Yale out of desperation: “‘I’m a model’ is a polarizing statement – people are either like ‘Really?’ and they ask a lot of questions or they become disdainful.  And the latter would immediately start talking to me in monosyllables.  So sometimes, because I didn’t like to be talked to as if I was four, I found myself dropping the school.  Just so they would talk to me like an adult.”