Katie Price on the cost of living life in the public eye

Just this week she was being castigated for showing pictures of her skinny frame on Twitter because of the influence she apparently has on young girls of today.

“I did that because newspapers were saying that I was getting fat or was pregnant. I wanted to show them that I wasn’t. I am very healthy and not pregnant. But when you read that about yourself it does have an effect. Are they trying to give me a complex? Sometimes you just have to stand up for yourself.”

Despite having lived much of her life in the public spotlight, and her protestations to the contrary, she does still seem to care what is written about her.

Her website has a section where she corrects all the false things she says are printed about her. For a woman so famous for being ballsy, she seems quite insecure.

But the 33-year-old mother-of-three needs the oxygen of publicity to survive. It is what created her and what could destroy her as quickly and she runs a fine-line between needing to be written about and her desire for people to know the truth about her.

“I am so different to the way people perceive me. When people meet me they say that I am so different to the things that are written about me.”

It is easy to dismiss Katie Price as a creation of the celebrity culture which represents all things superficial. But that would be to write her off too easily.

Where other successful Page 3 girls have gone on to television presenting, why is it that Katie Price has transcended those that came before her? One of the keys to her success is her ability to reinvent herself.

Once seen as little more than the successful glamour model Jordan, famous for her plastic surgery, whose photographs drunk and out of control adorned most red tops on a daily basis, she somehow managed to re-emerge as Katie Price, mother, best-selling author and shrewd business woman. As well as selling more than 4.2 million books, she has equestrian and baby fashion ranges, perfume and beauty ranges and is currently looking for a new top model for her show Discovered to be screened on Sky Living in the autumn. The winner will be signed to Katie’s Black Sheep modelling agency.

She was born Katie Infield in Brighton, East Sussex, England on May 22, 1978, and changed her last name to Price when my mother, Amy, remarried.

When she was 16 a friend suggested that she should pursue a modelling career.

“I attended loads of castings, had my fair share of negative responses then one day, in a studio next to where I was working, a model failed to turn up for a shoot. The photographer asked around if anyone would be interested in doing a topless shoot… and the rest, as they say, is history.”

Her topless modelling career took off when she became the first model to appear on Page 3 of The Sun every day for a week and Jordan the glamour model was created. She went on to grace the front covers of many magazines in the UK and Europe and in 2002 landed the front cover of Playboy.

But, being Katie Price, she had one eye on the future, which involved a lot more than simply taking her top off and being photographed.

She made a number of television appearances, but it was when she decided to take part in the ITV1 reality show I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here that people started to see more behind the brash veneer of Jordan. It was the first time that we had been shown Katie Price, rather than her alter ego.

It was also where she met her future husband the singer, Peter Andre. The couple went on to marry and have two children together, Junior and Princess Tiaamii.

They appeared in their own, much-maligned reality television show which followed their lives together.

Then in 2009 the couple divorced and their public wranglings, have been played out, like their relationship, very much in the public domain. It is something Katie seems to regret.

“I am worried that my children will read the things that were printed about my split from their dad,” she says.

Her children are the most important thing to her and her proudest achievement, she says. As well as Junior, six, and Princess, four, Katie has Harvey, nine. to footballer Dwight Yorke.

Harvey was born blind, with a condition known as septo-optic dysplasia, meaning that the development of his optic nerve was unpredictable.

As he has matured, she has also discovered that he is on the autistic spectrum, gains weight easily, and finds walking difficult.

She has made a number of films about Harvey’s condition and is patron of the Vision Charity.

“Just because I’m not photographed with my kids all the time, people say I’m not a good parent.

“But I’m always with my kids and I don’t really care what people think. I know what I’m about.”

Her subsequent marriage and divorce from cage fighter Alex Reid in less than a year did nothing to keep her out of the public eye.

Although she says she doesn’t care what people write about her, it was the lies being written about her which in 2004 led to the publication of the first of her four autobiographies, Being Jordan.

“I was sick and tired of other people writing so much rubbish about me that I decided I wanted to put the record straight,” she says. Being Jordan went on to sell one million copies. She was then approached to write a novel, Angel, about a young woman who becomes a model, with co-writer Rebecca Farnsworth, who ghost-wrote her autobiography. Angel was published in July 2006, and sold 300,000 copies in six weeks. Since then she has written five other novels, all of which she describes as good, easy reading.

She will be at the O2 in Leeds next week in an attempt to break the world record for book signing with her latest co-written work of fiction, The Comeback Girl, published tomorrow.

“It was the publisher’s idea,” she says. “I am always up for a challenge and I thought why not give it a go, although I have my doubts.”

It may be little more than a publicity stunt, but her publishers, Random House, are no small operation and they have put their name to the record attempt which will see Katie signing nearly 2,000 books in eight hours.

So what of the future. “I will stay in the public eye as long as the public want me too,” she tells me.

And for the moment there is a section of the public which still seems fascinated by her every move, even if it may be to the distaste of many others.

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