On Glamour

What Beauty Serves When Your World Caves in on Itself

[Cy Twombly]

A few years ago when I had just turned 40, I became the sickest I had ever known. I was just months away from my third book coming out, a memoir called Sick, and this was definitely not part of the plan. I turned 40 in January in California, presumably on a leftover winter break, and for most of it I was in denial: I could not be back to this sick. Little did I know it would take over two years to recover, over two years of losing everything I owned, my home, a relationship I cared deeply about, several friendships. The denial was the first big stage for me and it involved me talking through things with the friends who had seen me the sickest. One friend was another writer I had known since my first novel came out, a sort of mentor to me. He had been there through the absolute worst and could often hear when I was doing poorly before I could. On the phone, I avoided discussing my illness, but instead focused on politics, a real obsession of mine, and the conversation became relentless anti-Trump ranting. My friend shared my views and he offered some solutions. He reminded me of beauty. Glamour is resistance, he said to me and I loved in in the moment but by the time we hung up I did not love it. I looked at myself in the mirror that belonged to my always impossibly beautiful mother and I could barely recognize myself. At 40, I looked old, troubled, worn, exhausted. For ages, people had called me “glamorous” and rewarded me for my good style and all that, but it was gone. I could see that clearly. I could try to grasp for it—in the name of resistance—but it was probably impossible. I thought about my friend’s phrase as if it was a mantra and I resented it deeply. Glamour was inaccessible, beauty was maybe even ableist. This was where I was mentally and I would be for years, when all I owned was a few pairs of drugstore unswear and socks, whatever hand-me-downs friends could find for me, a few old my mother’s old gym clothes, and occasionally a simple item I decided to buy knowing full well I might have to dispose of it. I had become allergic to the world, and also addicted to moving from place to place—rootlessness had become my entire being, so I did not get the luxury of objects, never mind good ones. Glamour and beauty seemed tied to material wealth and I could not even imagine that delusion any longer.

I walked away from so much, so many, during those years.

I think a lot about how I was raised and my mother’s legendary beauty. She had been a swimming champ in Iran, the daughter of atomic energy execs, a native of Hamadan. She was the fairest skinned in our family, freckled even, hair that she dyed a dark cherry which seemed natural. She smelled like Lancome and Estee Launder and I almost never saw her without makeup—the one yoga class I dragged her to she wore so much makeup and perfume, I never asked again. She is still stunning and stylish and nothing engages her more than if we talk skincare or spend an afternoon at the mall. That’s all we ever did in my childhood, the mall the only refuge, glamour for her, the natural beauty, always a thing store-bought.

In the beginning of lockdown the thing I missed the most were flowers. I always stopped at stores near me or ordered some with my groceries, but, as they were not essential, they stopped being options. Then suddenly a month or two ago, I saw them pop up on my Instacart. And I began again, tulips and lilies and daisies and sunflowers and hydrangeas and roses. I also put an order at Mountain Rose Herb for rose petals to make jam out of, plus chamomile flowers and orange peel and clary sage. But my dedication to beautiful things did not stop with flowers: I was baking so many cakes when really I don’t love sweets—I’d rather have shrimp chips and frito pie and tacos any day over dessert—but because they were objects of beauty, something delightful to appeal to the eyes on social media. I started thinking a lot about edible beauty. I started ordering honeycomb—honeycomb and ricotta and fresh bread played in my mind endlessly— and I went further and found a Korean beauty site where I can get face creams made out of propolis and royal jelly. I bought a face mask, not an every-day kind but a special occasion one as I suspect pandemics will be the norm onward, and it is blood-red satin with a giant spider made out of rhinestones, crystals and gems—I’ve been eyeing two others made of linen with delicate embroidery, very much in keeping with this season’s cottage-core trends. Speaking of that, I have taken on botanical drawing, my bedside a mess of colored pencils and sketch paper and books full of beautiful flowers. Then I also returned to an old experiment I embarked on six years ago: dying my hair platinum blonde. It afforded me the first time I went into Manhattan since February and I was nervous, but I also really wanted my hair attended to, I really wanted to look like something again. With social media, it no longer matters that no one will see you—almost as many will see you as before, because where else do we all live but online. We are the visions of a passing scroll—at best we earn a pause, in this weird void of warped attention spans.

Maybe glamour for me was not resistance but survival. Survival at its apex is thriving and that to me feels like beauty attained. I bookmark photos of the women I consider the most beautiful person who ever lived: Tina Chow, the socialite, the woman who made the amazing boxy chunky lucite jewelry in the Eighties, wife of the incredibly glamorous Mr Chow, the first woman I knew of who died of AIDS. I bookmark also photos of the maned wolf, an animal I never knew of before lockdown, a being neither fox nor wolf though it looks like a mix except with much longer legs that are black while his body is that foxy red-brown—apparently this animal smells terrible and makes awful noises but it’s hard to remember that when faced with its unreal beauty. I bookmark all the experiences I want to have: autumn in the Japanese countryside, a winter refuge in Mexico City, a summer skipping islands in Greece, a sleepy spring in Ireland. The future will be better, I tell myself over and over, there is no other way.

I think a lot about how in my early teens I would look into that same mirror of my mother’s and cry because I was so incredibly ugly and the daughter of an exceptionally beautiful mother. I would try to see where my features went wrong: the too-big nose, the mustache, the bad skin, the uneven eyes, the frizzy hair, the comically lanky frame. I was Olive Oyl at best when my family wanted Snow White. I used to drape myself in my mother’s old formal-wear from Sixties Tehran and cover my face in her makeup until you couldn’t see me. Glamour was a great disguise. I watched so many old classic films I knew what I wanted. I started drawing a beauty mark with brown marker on my face—several of my childhood photos feature this, but of course most don’t. One of the craziest facts about my very existence is that flash forward three decades and that beauty mark actually appeared. I have one exactly where I drew it in as a child, where Marilyn Monroe’s falls, exactly where I dreamed of it. It’s as if those childhood dreams were sacred—I wrote in diaries of my intentions to be an author living in NYC, a published novelist before age 30. . . and my first novel came out three months before I turned 30. So much of what I set into motion in my life came from my first years on the plant.

I don’t think much about the future these days. Probably because the pandemic taught me you can’t really. Intentions and dreams are one thing, but if actualized they should be thoughts of as miracles. And I guess ultimately that’s what beauty has become for me: miracles in all sorts of forms. I no longer resent thinking of glamour as resistance. I no longer feel like beauty is all commerce. I think of it much more simply, like the miracle of simply being alive: here is my poodle breathing softly into a silk pillow. Here is the soft glow of a January morning. Here is a saffron candle burning, next to a potted hyacinth plant, reminding me Persian New Year is coming with the vernal equinox just up ahead. Here is laughter at another news cycle, here are protestors and activists remembering our tomorrow. Here is another year you decide to feel utterly confident you will live through, in spite of knowing there are no guarantees. Here is grace gold and silver and always gleaming without the need for us to polish it, here is despair gauzy and wispy because we know it is never as permanent as it tells us.