From The Straits Times    |

Tyra Banks got so stressed when writing her debut novel she developed alopecia.

The supermodel is currently sitting at number two on the New York Times’ bestsellers for children’s list of movies thanks to her tome Modelland.

The star is thrilled with how well the book has been received but admits writing it was a difficult process.

“Honestly, chilling for me was eating a meal. I couldn’t just look at the ocean. And in hindsight that wasn’t healthy. How can I say this without tearing up? I got a little alopecia from the stress,” she said.

Tyra hosts reality show America’s Next Top Model and has been studying at Harvard business school. She sometimes struggled to find the time to pen chapters due to her schedule, which was frustrating.

“I was staying in Lake Como shooting Top Model and I was working on it in the off days. It was a passion, so the discipline wasn’t hard. It was finding the time that was hard, and that was stressing me out and I felt the product was suffering,” she told the Wall Street Journal.

“Because my outline was so robust – 40 pages long – they thought I could do it faster. My chapters are between 11 and 15 pages, and I could never finish one in one day.”

Tyra got her mother to read her first draft of Modelland. Together they came up with some changes, which saw the star cut 50 per cent of what she’d written.

She’s now very proud of her work. The model explained she always intended to write a book for young people as she knew that’s where her talent lies.

“I’ve always felt very connected to teens. I was riding in the back of a car on the FDR and the idea just popped in my head. I just wrote the idea down on a piece of paper. I’m pretty realistic about myself and I didn’t think 50-year-old people would say, ‘I must read Tyra’s literature.’ I get it. I knew that I could communicate to teens better,” she admitted. © COVER MEDIA