“Reserved for G-Spot,” reads the sign on Goop CEO Gwyneth Paltrow’s company parking space, according to Amy Odell’s reporting in her new biography of the chameleonic celebrity, Gwyneth (Gallery Books). G-Spot, Oscar winner, golden girl, domestic goddess, wellness entrepreneur, conscious uncoupler and, as Odell writes, “one of the most resented celebrities in the world.”

“Love her or hate her,” Odell tells VF, “she has been a cultural influencer for 30 years.”

In the book, for which Odell interviewed more than 220 people—Paltrow, notably, not among them—the portrait Odell paints is complex. She writes seriously about Paltrow’s work ethic and talents as an actor, gives ample space to the nuances of the alleged abuse Paltrow suffered at the hands of Harvey Weinstein, who she said propositioned her for a massage during the time she was preparing to shoot the Miramax film Emma (Weinstein has denied her version of events, and his representative didn’t respond to VF’s request for comment), and traces the trajectory from her devastation in the wake of her father’s death (of complications of oral cancer and pneumonia, in Rome, during a trip celebrating his daughter’s 30th birthday) to her interest in alternative wellness solutions.

The author runs through the actor’s biological and proximal bona fides: child of the actor Blythe Danner and the producer Bruce Paltrow, goddaughter to Steven Spielberg. In high school, at the request of her father, Madonna wrote her a note discouraging her from smoking (“P.S.: Good girls live longer.” A representative for Madonna didn’t respond to VF’s request for comment). When she was getting rejected from colleges, her parents reportedly asked Michael Douglas to put in a good word at his alma mater, UC Santa Barbara, the school she ultimately attended. (Douglas confirmed to VF that he tried to help Paltrow get into UCSB. “I had produced a couple of projects with her father, Bruce, and acted early in my career with her mother, Blythe,” he wrote via a representative. “I was a theatre graduate from UCSB and spent some of the best years of my life in Santa Barbara.”) Not to mention her roll call of exes: fiancé Brad Pitt, boyfriend Ben Affleck, and husband Chris Martin.

She also presents the quotes that have gotten Paltrow pilloried in the press: “I can’t pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year,” and “I would rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a can,” and “To have a regular job and be a mom…of course there are challenges, but it’s not like being on set.” Odell writes that on Paltrow’s Spence graduation page, the yearbook editors listed her “nightmare” as “obesity”—a foreshadow of her Shallow Hal controversy to come.

At its crux, “I wanted to know if Gwyneth really believed in the things that she was publishing and selling,” Odell says. Read on to find out.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Vanity Fair: Why Gwyneth?

Amy Odell: Love her or hate her, she has been a cultural influencer for 30 years. Countless glossy magazine profiles have been written about her. I worked on this book for three years, I conducted really rigorous research, I interviewed more than 220 people, and I learned that those profiles only scratched the surface of who she really is.

Your interactions with Goop PR were hot and cold. Do you know if she’s read the book?

I have no idea. You would have to ask her. [Ed. note: A representative for Paltrow didn’t respond to VF‘s request for comment.]

Have you heard from her or her people?

No. I was in touch with her team over the course of the three-year process, pretty much most of that time. “Does Gwyneth want to talk to me? Does Gwyneth want to talk to me?” Right around the time I finished, I got a no.

You raise the question of her status as a nepo baby. How did you come to understand how much of a role her parents played in her career?

Her father was Bruce Paltrow, a very respected, well-known producer who did shows like St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues. And Blythe Danner, of course, is a famous actress. People probably more recently know her from movies like Meet the Parents. But when Gwyneth was a baby, she was regarded as the best actress in America, basically—maybe in the world. They would go every summer to Williamstown Theatre Festival in the Berkshires. Blythe would do plays by Chekhov. Gwyneth would be there and she would bear witness to her mom working. And when she was a little bit older, she got slotted into the productions, seemingly because she was Blythe’s daughter. I mean, nature and nurture, who knows? The doors would open for her. But when she walked in the room, she would deliver. People would say she was a knockout. She was great. She was mesmerizing. I heard that a lot. I mean, she didn’t get every part. When she wanted What About Bob? the casting director of that film said he needed someone funny, and she wasn’t funny.

I also think that’s important in understanding the Goop part because she was in the milieu that she has been in her whole life, this rarefied, glamorous, wealthy milieu. She never knew anything else. People told me her father had amazing taste and clothes and home interiors. He studied art at Tulane, and she seemed to absorb that. That really helped her market Goop.

Her dad’s illness obviously had a profound impact on her. How much do you think that played into her trajectory, wellness-wise?

My impression: enormously. She has called her dad the love of her life. He died of throat cancer when she was 30. Anybody who has a loved one who’s diagnosed with an illness like that, you go looking for answers. I can relate. I lost my dad when I was 27. Suddenly.

I’m sorry.

Thank you. In going and reading what she said about that part of her life where her dad I don’t think could eat normally, and she was injecting food, basically, into his stomach, and she was like, “What is in this?” And then she starts learning about what we put into our bodies and how that might affect our health. I can understand, personally, that desire to have answers.

When something like that, that is so unfathomable, happens to you, you want an explanation, even though there just might not be a good explanation. But I think she found answers in wellness. And I think she regurgitated her findings out to her fans and the public through Goop.

So many of her films, including after her Oscars win with Shakespeare in Love, were critical and commercial disappointments. What do you think happened?

Well, Hollywood calls that the Oscar Curse. Some people might say that it’s just hard to find another role after you ascend to the pinnacle of your career. And she was 26. So young. And then you’ve reached the peak. People told me that she seemed to have a little bit of a crisis like, “Oh my God, now what am I going to do?” She wanted to do comedy and slapstick stuff, and that just didn’t work.

She seemed to succeed the most when she was in roles that were similar to her life. The director of A Perfect Murder said he wanted to cast her because she was that woman. She had lived on the Upper East Side, understood that world. Emma, she plays an aristocratic, well-to-do, even though it’s hundreds of years ago, young woman. Great Expectations, too. Even though that wasn’t the best movie, and [director] Alfonso Cuarón has kind of denounced it, she’s memorable. You remember she wore that green outfit by Donna Karan. And then Royal Tenenbaums, too. They were a well-to-do family.

When you’re listing all of these, and thinking of The Talented Mr. Ripley too, they’re all iconic style films, and she was a style icon in each of them.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Royal Tenenbaums, the Margot character—it’s on the runway, like cyclically. It’s like phases of jeans or something. That character comes back.

Speaking of style icons, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and Gwyneth had a run-in when she was shooting Sliding Doors, and according to your reporting, Carolyn wasn’t a huge fan. Do you have any sense of how Paltrow felt about her?

I just know that Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, her job, she was basically dressing VIPs at Calvin Klein. And that’s how she met JFK Jr., because he came in to get a custom fitting. So Gwyneth was one of the people, because Calvin Klein wanted to dress her, because she’s this young glamorous actress doing highbrow movies, and quite frankly, people told me repeatedly she had the thin body type that he wanted to see wearing his clothes, those ‘90s slip dresses. She would go by the office and pick out clothes. She would encounter Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. I talked to people close to her who said Gwyneth just kind of irked her, and she would see a picture of Gwyneth in the newspaper and have kind of a smart remark about it.

Talk to me about Paltrow’s ongoing love affair with private jets.

When you’re a movie star, people remove obstacles from your life in a profound way. And once she became famous enough that she was recognized widely, you go out to a nice dinner, someone gets the check, you want to go somewhere for a bachelorette party or bridal shower, whatever, Warner Brothers has a jet for you. Harvey Weinstein would do that too. Someone told me that he didn’t always have the most money to pay people, but he did have access to private jets and give people a few rides on private jets.

Regarding Weinstein, did anything surprise you in your reporting around what she calls their “fraught” working relationship?

I believe she also called him abusive. He disputed that in comments sent to me from prison through his rep. He said a couple of things I didn’t know. One, that Gwyneth recommended Winona Ryder for Shakespeare In Love. Of course, Gwyneth ended up in the movie and Miramax sources, and the director John Madden told me they never really seriously considered anybody but Gwyneth. [A representative for Madden didn’t respond to VF’s request for comment.] To them, it was Gwyneth’s movie, but she suggested Winona, according to him.

I asked [Weinstein], “She said that your relationship was abusive,” and he blamed the fracturing—this is his side of the story—on two things. One, he said after she won her Oscar, she was commanding crazy fees for her films. So let’s say her fee is, I don’t know, $8 million, $10 million, he said his budgets capped out at $25 million per movie. She was kind of outpaced from working on independent films, and that’s where she really thrived.

And then the other thing he said that he believed had not a great effect on their relationship, Gwyneth wanted her brother Jake to write and direct an adaptation of Donna Tartt‘s The Secret History. He had spent a lot of money acquiring the rights to that, and he decided not to go through with Gwyneth’s brother’s version of that film, and that damaged their relationship. But he was a difficult boss, by all accounts. I talked to a lot of people on Miramax, and he was really tough.

In a variety of ways.

Yeah, yeah.

Paltrow goes through a particularly tumultuous time where she’s dating Ben Affleck, and his best friend Matt Damon’s dating Minnie Driver but breaks up with her and starts dating Winona Ryder—and somehow Paltrow ends up on the outs with both women. Do you chalk that up to the general chaos of one’s twenties? Or something else?

Probably part of it is the chaos of that. It seemed to me like she was viewing Winona through the eyes of Ben Affleck, in a way, and how Ben viewed his friend’s girlfriend. But the Shakespeare in Love—obviously that’s lore, right? That she pulled the script off of Winona’s coffee table. What happened was she was sent the script, she might not have read it because she had just done Emma and she said she didn’t want to do another period film. Then the producer bumps into her on the street and is like, “Why aren’t you doing this movie? It’s Tom Stoppard, it’s amazing. Why wouldn’t you do it?” It sounded to me like what happened was she was staying with Winona and she picked the script up off of her table and read it, and then decided to commit.

What role do you think that sexism plays in the public conversation around Paltrow?

After she won her Oscar, the media really turned on her. And it seemed to me what people were reacting to were her circumstances. The New York Times did an article that inflamed people, that she was wearing a six figure necklace, I believe it was by Harry Winston, with her pink dress at the Oscars, and then her dad decided to buy it for her as a gift because he was so proud of her. And the Times wrote that up, and then that was called out in some of these articles about how she was so annoying. A lot of that did seem to me like sexism. And this was before she became known for promoting health misinformation. I think there’s a lot of sexism wrapped up with any, probably, female public figure, and the aughts were not a great time for that.

You get into pretty intimate details—including that Paltrow reportedly liked it when Affleck “tea-bagged” her. [A representative for Affleck didn’t respond to VF’s request for comment.] Do you think there’s a line when it comes to reporting about someone as famous as Paltrow?

I think there’s always a line. She’s someone who has monetized her sexuality and her sex life, and she’s given multiple podcast interviews with explicit details about her sex life. I think that that’s an aspect of her personality that, early on in her public life, her friends saw and the public didn’t see so much, and once it became a business concern to her, she started promoting it publicly.

I was at the AmFar Gala in 2014, at the table next to Paltrow, who was hosting. It was maybe six months after she and Chris Martin launched their “conscious uncoupling,” and at one point she announced, in a very celebratory way, that Martin was going to be a surprise musical guest that evening. The crowd reaction was bonkers. All major celebrity splits garner attention, but what about this one do you think brought out so much schadenfreude?

She announced it on Goop, using it to drive awareness of Goop, and it was so successful that the site crashed because they got so much traffic. I think it was “conscious uncoupling.” It was that whole concept where, if I recall correctly, the coverage was like, “Gwyneth thinks that her divorce is better than mine.” But people told me, “Hey, she was just trying to make it easier on her kids.

I think a lot of people, their lives are affected in some way by divorce, and it can be really, really ugly. So I actually admire that about her, that she got that idea out into the world.

You talked to a number of current and former Goop employees. What revelations about that environment stood out most to you?

I wanted to know if Gwyneth really believed in the things that she was publishing and selling. And people said that she did. She really believed in those gurus. I mean, you guys have covered them. Shaman Durek [Verrett], he’s quite fascinating. But he said in one of his books that part of the reason doctors prescribe chemotherapy to cancer patients is because they make money off of it. [Durek didn’t respond to VF’s request for comment.] These are the things that experts find really troubling. And the jade egg—did she really believe in that stuff? People said they didn’t understand it, but she did believe in that stuff.