An open letter to Lily Allen: Don’t go changing

Rachel Johnson is saddened by the pop star’s MySpace lament about being ‘a bit chubby’ and tells her to keep fighting the ‘evil machine’ that forces female stars to look like stick insects Dear Lily Allen, I know you’re more likely to see this if I post it on your webpage on MySpace, but I’m still not hip to that (though I have kids), so I am sending this to be published on shiny paper in a weekly news magazine founded in 1828 instead, which I know isn’t very ontrend of me. Sorry!

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that I feel for you. Really do. I read in the newspapers here in the UK that you’re having a rocky time on your US tour.

I managed to log on to MySpace, which involved having my forgotten password resent a few times, and eventually, I sort of navigated round your page, with all the smiley icons winking on and off, and managed to read your recent blog, where you sound really down.

It made me sad to read. I hope that my daughter, who knows all the lyrics to your songs off by heart (as she proves on long car journeys!), never gets to find out that you are so low, and never gets to find out why.

Basically, her world would be rocked to the core to learn that you, Lily Allen, an English rose, and the only highly successful person left in showbiz who seems to have her own individuality, character, breasts, original adult teeth, attitude and charisma, might fall victim to the same totally weird pressures that make all those women in Los Angeles rid their bodies of all subcutaneous fat, bleach and veneer their teeth, inflate their flat chests with silicone, and do things to their faces that make them look as if they have spent weeks in a burns unit after being rescued from a bad house fire.

She thought you were different. So did I. And my message to you now is — you still are. So just don’t go there. It’s a very bad place to be.

And so the purpose of this letter is to cheer you on, because I’ve just read your blog in which you are very honest and open about what you feel, about yourself, about fame, competition, being female and other stressy stuff and I’ve also looked at the millions of replies you seem to be getting from your home team all across the planet.

On 12 May you told us you’d been held up at immigration and accused of assaulting a photographer, but though that was sucky you still seemed pretty up, and 127 friends added comments, most of them supportive (obviously, I couldn’t scroll through them all. I’d be, like, online all night).

Later that night, though, you posted an entry catchlined ‘fat, ugly and shitter than winehouse’, and the whole freakin’ blogosphere wept with you. Here’s what you — the totally talented singer and lyricist, who has just designed and released her own range for New Look, who is gobby and curvy and cheeky, and an inspiration to all our daughters, not just mine — said on your MySpace page (PS, I’ve kept your special spellings and punctuation intact): ‘fat, ugly and shitter than winehouse, that is all i am, im on my own in america again. I used to pride myself on being strong minded and not being some stupid girl obsessed with the way I look. I felt like it didnt matter if I was a bit chubby cause, im not a model, I’m a singer. Im afraid I am not strong and have fallen victim to the evil machine. I write to you in a sea of tears from my hotel bed in Seattle, I have spent the past hour researching gastric bypass surgery, and laser lipo suction.’ There were 1,782 replies to this post, of which this one — from Yaz X — is pretty representative. ‘When i was a little girl some other girls in school told me that I was nothing. I ran home crying to my grandmother. My grandmother said, “You tell them to F**k off!” Then think to yourself, “kiss my entire a$$”.’ Then there are loads like this one from Nikki: ‘Lily you are my inspiration, don’t fall on the skinny Paris Hilton wannabe bandwagon. You are what makes us normal girls actually feel normal.’ Well, I think Yaz X and Nikki sum things up, and I can’t really add to their wise words, so I will just finish up by saying, look, Lily. I know (because I’ve just spent two weeks touring the US too, seven cities in two weeks, but only as an author and not as an international chart-topping pocket Venus superstar) how hard it is being on your own in a hotel room in the US.

The TV is sh*t, the movies on pay-perview in the room seem to feature nothing but The Pursuit of Happyness, with Will Smith, on a loop, you can’t open the windows (because if you did, you would throw yourself out, according to my bellboy), the showers suck, and there’s only so much chicken Caesar salad one can eat off room service without almost dying from stomach cramps.

So believe me, Lily, I had my minibar moments too, when my only friend seemed to be the $9 jar of roasted cashews, the chilled bottles of Bud, and the mystifying new addition to the shelves offered to those in search of ‘interfacing’ with new ‘business partners’ (I’m talking ’bout the Intimacy Pack).

I can totally understand why you, like me, might have consumed the contents of the mini-bar for supper instead of venturing forth to Spago (actually, you were in Seattle, so let’s make that Starbucks) with one of your label’s duty nannies.

I seem to remember doing that a few times too, and then feeling hungry in San Francisco and then delighted to discover that my hotel (the Japanese run Nikko) had round-the-clock room-service sushi, which was great.

So, to finish this letter, here’s what I think. Don’t go changing. We all love you exactly as you are, and we urge you to rage, rage against what you call the ‘evil machine’ of Hollywood studios, record labels, and the unwomanly, inhuman female body image promoted for lesser stars than you, with not an iota of your talent, by the double zero stylists.

All I would say is, though — don’t share your pain and fears with the whole wide world on the web after you’ve been on your own in a hotel room for too long, cos everyone will think you’ve been drunk-blogging when of course you haven’t.

Love you!

A Fan, London W11 (or should I say LDN!!)