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In her memoir ‘Uptown Girl,’ Christie Brinkley writes about the scary incident that led her to divorce Billy Joel.

By Christie Brinkley Harper Influence: 416 pages, $34 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.

To make it as a fashion model is one thing; to endure in such an intensely competitive field, as Christie Brinkley has done, is quite another.

If Brinkley’s new memoir, “Uptown Girl,” has one lesson to impart to its readers, it’s that no one, not even the beauty icon, rides through life for free.

Brinkley, who grew up in Canoga Park and Malibu, was discovered in 1973 by photographer Errol Sawyer at 19 while waiting for a payphone on a Paris street corner.