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Owning the Narrative: Why Between Us Isn’t a Memoir, It’s Bella Hadid Reclaiming Control
- Team Roe Magazine
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
In a culture built on constant visibility, being seen has never been easier or more misleading.
Bella Hadid has spent the better part of a decade at the center of that contradiction. Her image has circulated endlessly: across runways, campaigns, paparazzi shots, and social media feeds. She is, by all measures, one of the most visible figures of her generation. And yet, that level of exposure has never quite translated into clarity. If anything, it has done the opposite.
This is what makes Between Us feel less like a retrospective and more like a correction.
Framed as a visual memoir created alongside her childhood best friend, Yasmin Ediba, the book traces Bella Hadid’s life from her early years in Malibu to the height of her fashion career. It unfolds through photographs, handwritten notes, text messages, and previously unseen personal archives. On the surface, it offers what many celebrity projects promise: intimacy, access, a glimpse behind the scenes. But what it actually delivers is something more deliberate; a reassertion of authorship.
Because the uncomfortable truth is that the more we see someone, the less we tend to understand them.
In an environment saturated with images, repetition creates the illusion of familiarity. Faces become recognisable, aesthetics become identifiable, narratives begin to form — not necessarily because they are true, but because they are consistent. Over time, a public figure’s identity is shaped less by who they are and more by how often we encounter a particular version of them. Visibility, in this sense, becomes a kind of distortion.
Bella Hadid has existed within that distortion for years. Her image has been interpreted, aestheticized, and replicated at scale. She has influenced trends, defined visual eras, and occupied a central role in fashion’s cultural landscape. But like many figures at that level of exposure, her narrative has largely been constructed externally — through editorial framing, public projection, and the cumulative effect of thousands of images detached from their original context.
Between Us interrupts that process.
By shifting the lens, quite literally, to someone who knew her before any of this began, the book reframes the story from the inside. Yasmin Ediba’s perspective introduces a continuity that the public narrative has always lacked. The images are not optimized for impact or perfection; they are anchored in proximity, history, and familiarity. They capture moments that exist outside of performance: childhood, adolescence, private transitions, emotional pauses.
What emerges is not a cleaner version of Bella Hadid, but a more complex one.
This distinction matters. There is a difference between being exposed and choosing to reveal. The former is passive, often fragmented, shaped by forces outside one’s control. The latter is intentional, structured, and perhaps most importantly limited. It decides not only what is shown, but how it is framed, when it is shared, and what remains out of reach.
In this sense, the intimacy of Between Us does not feel accidental. It feels curated in a different way, not polished, but purposeful. The inclusion of handwritten notes, text messages, and unguarded images suggests an attempt to reclaim parts of a narrative that have long been dispersed across platforms, publications, and public perception.
It also highlights a broader cultural shift.
There is a growing awareness that visibility does not equal truth. That access, in its most common form, is often performative. That seeing more of someone does not necessarily bring us closer to understanding them, it simply increases the volume of interpretation.
As a result, projects that slow down the process, that gather, edit, and re-present a life in a fixed, intentional format, begin to carry a different kind of weight. They resist the endless cycle of updates. They step outside of immediacy. They replace accumulation with selection.
A book, in this context, is not just a medium. It is a boundary.
It fixes the narrative in place. It creates distance from the constant churn of imagery. It allows for a version of the story that cannot be reshaped in real time, cannot be endlessly reinterpreted through algorithmic visibility or fleeting attention.
For someone whose image has been in constant motion, that stillness becomes significant.
Between Us does not attempt to resolve the contradictions of Bella Hadid’s public and private selves. It does not fully explain her, nor does it claim to. Instead, it introduces friction into a narrative that has long been too smooth, too consistent, too easily consumed.
And perhaps that is its most defining quality. Because at a certain level of visibility, the goal is no longer to be seen more clearly. It is to disrupt the assumption that being seen at all was ever enough.
