A die-hard fan on how even in heartbreak, Gwyneth Paltrow will find a way to teach us all a lesson in how to be better – like her.
My heart sank when I got the email: “A note from GP,” it read.
It was classic GOOP: clean, simple, and deceptively intimate, as if my good friend Gwyneth was personally notifying me of her decision to split from her husband. And almost as if it was a friend, I felt sad for Gwyneth Paltrow, whose cookbooks I’ve bought, whose cleanses I’ve tried, and whose abs I’ve coveted.
I also had to roll my eyes, because in true GOOP fashion, even her breakup announcement was totally, completely ridiculous.
GOOP, for those of you trying to understand what this word could possibly mean, is Paltrow's lifestyle website, which started as a newsletter in 2008. (She's said the name is a nickname she made up, stemming from her initials.) On Tuesday, after she posted the news of her breakup there, the site crashed, as millions of people who had never clicked on one of her recipes for paella or green juice desperately navigated over to read her letter.
But, even in announcing that she and Chris Martin, the Coldplay frontman and father of her two children, were splitting after 10 years, Gwyneth (it's impossible to think of her by her last name in this context) flaunted her trademark style: a little too earnest, and blissfully unaware of how pretentious she sounds.
Accompanied by an Instagram-worthy vintage photo of the couple and the infuriatingly buzzword-y headline "Conscious Uncoupling," the post also included pages of advice on divorce from a pair of GOOP-endorsed experts.