Being Plus-Size on 'America's Next Top Model' Was Meant to Be My "Hook"

In 2007, Tyra Banks' reality show America's Next Top Model was at its peak. Sarah Hartshorne, then a 19-year-old student at Boston University, attended an open-call audition for the show's ninth season. She made the cut. "After practicing my reaction so many times," she writes in her new memoir You Wanna Be On Top?, "I was just quietly stunned."

Below, Hartshorne describes meeting her fellow contestants for the first time. Content warning: The below excerpt includes references to body dysmorphia.

A few days after arriving in Puerto Rico, I found myself blindfolded and forbidden to speak on a bus full of other young, sweaty, beautiful girls. There are a lot of moments from my time filming America’s Next Top Model that, looking back, didn’t age well. But even at the time, this felt fucking deranged.

It all started when we, a group of about 50 overexcited women, landed in San Juan, flown in from every corner of America. I’m guessing that there were only 50 of us; I don’t know if I ever saw all the other girls at once. We were very rarely together in groups larger than four or five, and even then, we weren’t ever allowed to speak to one another—which was disconcerting, yes, but we’d arrived! The selected few! Chosen from the boatloads (pardon the nautical pun) of people who had tried out. And now, I was being flown out to Puerto fricking Rico.

As I walked alone through the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, I felt glamorous, important, and clueless. “International! Supermodel!” I chanted to myself under my breath. It was late May and still cold and gray in Boston. The tropical warmth enveloped me like a humid hug as I walked through the sliding doors outside. Glamorous. Clueless.

Standing in the pickup area of the airport was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, in cutoff jeans, a white tank top, and high-heeled Candie's mules, leaning nonchalantly against her Louis Vuitton luggage. I later learned she was Janet Mills, from Bainbridge, Georgia. With a pixie cut and a cigarette in hand, Janet looked like Audrey Hepburn with a tan and a body for days. Next to her was Lisa Jackson, who turned around to face me, and I barely came up to her collarbones, an unusual experience for me at 5''11. I looked up into her catlike green eyes. She smiled down at me. She was also wearing a miraculously unstained white tank top over a denim skirt and espadrilles. I’d never met anyone who wore heels on an airplane before. Lisa was truly stunning: so long and lean and beautiful that I was actually stunned. It was almost jarring, like encountering an alien.

As more and more girls began to gather at our designated pickup spot, they all started to look like aliens: impossibly thin, impossibly symmetrical. There was no question what they were there for. I was acutely aware that, on the one hand, they were literally my competition. On the other hand, all I wanted was for them to like me. We’d only just started this insane journey, and already I was desperate for companionship, for one of them to reassure me that this was all out of the ordinary for them too.

“Hi, is this...this is...is this for the...for Top Model?” I stammered, my voice cracking.

“Yeah, hi!” said one of the girls.

“Oh, thank gawwwdddd,” said Janet. “I’ve been standing here with y’all for twenty minutes too afraid to ask!” Her Southern accent was strong and sweet and punctuated with passionate italic emphasis that really let you savor all the extra syllables. Another girl nearby heard it and asked her where she was from, and they started trading anecdotes about Georgia.

As we sat there getting to know one another, awkwardly and sweetly, the extroverts started to make themselves known. One girl who didn’t make it into the house asked everyone to go around and say what they thought their “hook” would be on the show.

“Like, obviously, I’m going to be the sexy Victoria’s Secret girl, but what’s everyone’s, like, thing?” she said.

We all looked around, nervously sizing one another up. Even Lisa looked a little unsure.

“Well, I guess I’ll be a Georgia peach with the fat ass!” said Janet, and we all giggled, but I felt a Georgia peach pit in my stomach. This was 2007, the Kardashians weren’t famous yet, and a fat ass was not a good thing. If her ass was fat, what was mine? The whole time we’d been standing there, I’d been clocking the differences between the other girls and myself, and I felt like a whale, 30 to 50 pounds heavier than everyone I could see. I was beginning to realize that I’d been flown out for a different purpose from the other girls. They were all there to compete and prove that they were the Absolute Ideal: what society tells us we are all supposed to aspire to. And I was there to be Almost That but—notably—Not. It was up to me to prove something I wasn’t ready to believe: that Not That could be just as good as That.

My body dysmorphia was like a cat, always threatening to knock my dieting off the counter into a full-blown eating disorder, occasionally taking a swing. I had made it a rule never to talk about it ever since I let it slip that I thought of myself as chubby my freshman year. I can still remember my friend’s face as she looked at me uncertainly to figure out if I was joking or not.

“Do you mean that?” she asked.

I looked back at her, just as uncertain. I knew I’d said something wrong, but I didn’t know what was right.

“I mean, kind of,” I said. “I guess maybe that’s not the right word, but I don’t know.”

“Sarah,” she said, stern, “it is...not the right word.”

I felt squirmy, like a grub whose rock has been overturned. My weight and body took up almost all my mental energy, but talking about it seemed to only make it worse. I was tempted to yell, Pay no attention to that anxious girl behind the curtain!

And now, as I looked around at all these achingly thin girls, it was starting to hit me that every challenge, every panel, every conversation going forward, was going to be about my weight. That was going to be My Thing, no matter what else I did.

Excerpted from YOU WANNA BE ON TOP? by Sarah Hartshorne. Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Hartshorne. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.