Friday, November 29, 2024

Seven thought-provoking books about models and the dark side of beauty

Laura Elizabeth Woollett is the author of a short story collection, The Love of a Bad Man (2016), and three novels, Beautiful Revolutionary (2018), The Newcomer (2021), and West Girls (2024). The Love of a Bad Man was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction. Beautiful Revolutionary was shortlisted for the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. West Girls was longlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize and is shortlisted for the South Australian Literary Award for Fiction. Woollett was the City of Melbourne’s 2020 Boyd Garret writer-in-residence, a 2020-22 Marten Bequest scholar for prose, and will be a 2025 writer-in-residence at the Keesing Studio in Paris.

At Electric Lit the author shared a list of "books about models, ranging from young adult fiction to critical thinking, [that] exposes the contradictory ugliness and transcendence of being professionally beautiful." One title on the list:
Look At Me by Jennifer Egan

Charlotte Swenson, a falling star of Manhattan’s fashion scene, gets into a near-fatal car crash outside her hometown in Illinois, becoming unrecognisable. While the premise of Jennifer Egan’s second novel could be the jumping-off point for deep-dive into the beauty and disfigurement, the concerns of Look At Me are much broader: small town life, family madness, industrialisation, American dreams and nightmares, the construction and commodification of identity. It’s an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink novel, and doesn’t always cohere, yet it’s packed with ideas and weirdly prescient about online self-curation.
Read about another entry on the list.

Look At Me is among Jennifer Banash's seven novels about selling your soul, Jenny Shank's five big, engrossing books, and Julie Christie's seven favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue