| Next Page is a newsletter written by senior correspondent and book critic Constance Grady. She covers books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. Read her latest work on our site. |
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| Next Page is a newsletter written by senior correspondent and book critic Constance Grady. She covers books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. Read her latest work on our site. |
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For the past few months, I've been mulling over two recent books with the provocative titles of Ugly and Ugliness. These memoirs, both by women who self-identify as ugly, feel particularly relevant at a time when half the internet is talking like looksmaxxers and the plastic surgery plans of women in the White House have become aspirational to half the country. These books pushed me to think about what we mean when we use the word ugly, where our definitions of ugliness come from, and what might happen if we stopped demanding an ideal as narrow as beauty out of our lumpy human bodies. To call someone ugly feels so malicious, so aggressive. And yet, people every day, especially women, are treated badly worse by the world if they are not as conventionally attractive as their peers. To deny someone the language to name their own reality feels perverse. Calling yourself ugly looks little like hitting yourself in the face with a hammer; it's such a cruel word, so hard to state neutrally. The provocative and never-quite-answered question of these memoirs is whether it can become, instead, an act of love. I'll have a full essay on these ideas out in the next issue of Vox's The Highlight, coming in April. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts. How have you been thinking about beauty and ugliness these days? Email me back and let me know. |
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Book recommendations to get lost in |
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- For a showbiz memoir to be worth it, it has to be gossipy. Luckily, Never Mind the Happy from Marc Shaiman, half the team behind the music for Broadway's Hairspray, has zero compunctions about namedropping. Chatty and vindictive, Shaiman walks readers through a career both sublime (he got his first break playing the piano for Bette Midler) and hellish (remember Smash, the 2012 TV show for which the term hate-watching was invented?). Along the way, he feuds with Scott Rudin, smokes pot with Stephen Sondheim, and gets his revenge on Nora Ephron. The stories are worth it.
- Allegra Goodman's This Is Not About Us is a warm and funny family novel that begins with an irreparable rift. At a family gathering, Sylvia makes apple cake from her sister Helen's recipe — and everyone agrees that Sylvia's version is better. Wouldn't you be offended, too? Helen decides then and there that she will never speak to Sylvia again, triggering a feud that echoes across the lives of their children and grandchildren. What makes this book such a pleasure to read is the specificity of Goodman's characters in their pettiness and their squabbles: the woman trying to work up the courage to ask her sister if she liked her hand-knit pussy hat, the recently divorced dad who gets intimidated by a new pair of glasses that make everybody tell him he looks cool. You've met them all before, and in Goodman's capable hands, you're happy to meet them again.
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📲 For more thoughts from Constance Grady, follow her on X, Threads, or BlueSky. |
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