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A Letter to My Daughter
by Stephanie Fairyington
A tender, moving, and insightful account of queer motherhood and an interrogation of life on the margins of American culture as a self-described "ugly" woman.
Ugly is a word with fangs that can kill a woman's self-esteem in one bite. Edicts about how women should look, behave, and think are the brutal forge through which they are made — not born. And to defy the pretty imperative is to become invisible. It can be a hard thing to admit to yourself, let alone to your child— to say the words, "I am ugly," or "I am seen as ugly." But early on in her motherhood journey, watching her young daughter begin to wrestle with beauty standards, Stephanie Fairyington felt compelled to face her own demons, to unpack her own ugly self-perception, one that she could trace to her own childhood, in order to conquer this seemingly immoveable frontier, far too taboo even among women to broach—the ways in which women's lives are unfairly contoured by the nature of their looks.
The multiple iterations of ugliness that Fairyington saw in her young self—her physical appearance, her unavoidably obvious queerness, and her dissonant gender expression—are not present in her beautiful and traditionally feminine daughter. But Fairyington's old feelings of inadequacy take on new meaning as she confronts fresh insecurities around her role as the non-biological mother in her relationship, exacerbating wounds from a lifetime of being treated differently: from the poverty of her genetic inheritance to questions about her parentage to doubts about the legitimacy of her family.
Interlacing cultural history and analysis with memoir, Ugly is a probing investigation into cultural norms and the formation of our aesthetic sense of self. Fairyington contrasts her so-called ugliness with her daughter's attraction and adherence to beauty ideals, a tender and tenuous condition that by age seven she was already walking a tightrope to maintain. By sharing the history of her troubled self-image, Fairyington invites us to go rogue, to invent a new language and logic to overthrow all the ways that women have been cultivated to hate themselves.
"Valiant and audacious...Through reflections on parenthood, LGBTQ+ historical context, and biting reprovals of American culture, Fairyington's concerns for her impressionable offspring are valid, sharp, and urgent, yet eloquently conveyed in this hybrid of maternal love letter and cautionary counsel." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"This maternal manifesto makes a major impression." —Publishers Weekly
"A polemic, a memoir, and an important addition to the feminist canon, Ugly is a beautiful book and I am so incredibly glad it exists." —Molly Jong-Fast, author of How to Lose Your Mother
"Stephanie Fairyington displays a keen intellect and a warm inclusive heart as she takes on the looks-based oppression of women and girls in this endearing letter to her young daughter. Although we are all still plagued by the idea of female imperfection, Ugly brings some hope that there are ways to resist lookism—and is a story and analysis sorely needed." —Joan Jacobs Brumberg, author of Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa
This information about Ugly was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Stephanie Fairyington is a journalist who writes on gender, sexuality, family, and parenting. A former contributing writer for The Advocate and former senior staff writer at Arianna Huffington's Thrive Global, her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Atlantic, among others. She lives in Brooklyn with her spouse and daughter.
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