Reader’s Guide
Such a Pretty Face, despite its title, isn’t going to make you prettier, at least not in the physical sense. It may make you feel more beautiful, though. The stories collected here talk about the subtle, infinite variations of beauty and the possibility of finding it, within yourself or close at hand.
In exploring beauty, the authors acknowledge our culture’s obsession with physical perfection, often as defined by the media, but they refuse to accept beauty’s myths. Their stories redefine beauty, showing that it can be a stunning moment of self-recognition, or a friend who knows when to sit without judgment at your side, or a moment in nature, or one special person who charms you with his or her honesty or uniqueness. Real beauty is more than a pretty face.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1) What are the unwritten rules for the physically beautiful, depicted in Ron Koertge’s short story, “Such a Pretty Face”? Are Melissa’s efforts to negotiate these rules successful? Do you observe unwritten rules or expectations for those who are deemed beautiful in your own world or group of friends?
2) “I felt sorry. For her. ’Cause you know what? I really liked her. And you know what? In those moments when I could stop seeing me where she was supposed to be? Cherry was really pretty,” says the narrator in Chris Lynch’s “Red Rover, Red Rover.” Why can’t he see Cherry’s beauty when he sees himself in her?
3) What does it mean to be swan beautiful in a family full of ducks, or duck beautiful in a family full of swans, in Jamie Pittel’s story, “What I Look Like”? In what ways do you believe most teens feel swan beautiful in a world of ducks?
4) Mary Ann Rodman’s story, “Farang,” looks at cultural beauty. In this story, the Thai girls try to be more American, and the American girls lust to be thin and tiny like the Thai girls. The protagonist, Lauren, recognizes that there’s a different sort of beauty inside each person’s heart. “But good hearts don’t show,” she concludes, “the way that light skin and long shiny hair do.” What does she mean when she draws this conclusion? Do you agree or disagree that this is the way it is?
5) In the story “Ape,” protagonist Ford Gordon talks about the myth of uniformity and conformity, explaining that his grandfather, who immigrated to the United States at a time when Greeks were looked on suspiciously, hid his heritage by changing his name to Gordon. Ford himself has learned to blend in by ridding himself of a Boston accent. He says, “Now I speak a perfect California tongue, flavorless as tap water. Here in Sacramento, people converse with perfectly blended uniformity, as similar as the pastel tract homes we live in.” Still, he stands out because of his physical appearance. When he tries to hide his hirsute appearance in order to blend in, Ford is giving in to contemporary myths about physical beauty. He is taking them on as reality. What are some beauty myths, and how do we act when we believe they are our reality?
6) “I think it’s payback because I like being beautiful. Because . . . maybe I’m not so nice to people who aren’t,” says Zelly of her truly bad-hair-day experience in Lauren Myracle’s short story, “Bad Hair Day.” Zelly and her best friend, Kristin, agree that everyone makes secret fun of others’ flaws. Even their saintly friend, Scout, probably says mean things behind people’s backs. Do you think this is true, that most or all people poke fun at others when their flaws become apparent?
7) Beauty, in Norma Fox Mazer’s story, “How to Survive a Name,” recognizes early on that she is no beauty, but it is a note from a classmate that makes her realize how much it hurts to know others see this lack of beauty. How does she handle this realization?
8) After Tiny finds the semiconscious Bella under the stage trapdoor in Tim Wynne-Jones’s story, “Bella in Five Acts,” he tries to help her find beauty in life. For Tiny, what is beauty? How does he bring this beauty to his world?
9) Tiny tells Bella that in crossing over High Lake to Graduation Beach, you need to keep your tips up. What does he mean with this metaphor? How is he keeping his own metaphoric tips up?
10) Ellen Wittlinger’s “Cheekbones” allows readers to see more than one response to physical beauty through the eyes of Lucy and her mother. How do the two characters view the importance of physical beauty? Is there one correct interpretation?
11) The loss of physical beauty plays a small role in Anita Riggio’s “Bingo,” but this is actually a story about Peter Roscoe learning to appreciate the natural beauty of life through his friendship with Maeve. What does it take for Peter to recognize all that he has?
12) In Jacqueline Woodson’s story, “My Crazy, Beautiful World,” readers watch Angela face the shock of seeing herself and her group through the eyes of outsiders. In seeing herself this way, how does Angela define beauty in her own life?
13) Two stories, Louise Hawes’s “Sideshow” and J. James Keels’s “Ape,” contain references to carnival freak shows, where carnival-goers would pay to look at people who stood out from the norm, people considered freaks. Why do you think that the theme of beauty would draw writers to consider these shows?
WRITING ACTIVITIES
1) Tiny, in “Bella in Five Acts,” tells Bella that Shallow Lake, the lake where his family owns a cottage, is in his mind High Lake. He says some people waterski and others swim across to Graduation Beach. He has learned that, if you plan to ski across, you have to keep your tips up. Write about the method you would use to cross the lake and include what you’ve learned about the possible problems or obstacles in making this crossing.
2) Write about a time when you learned something about how you experience beauty in your world.
1) Using magazine cutouts, drawings, words, and phrases, create a collage that defines beauty as you perceive it.
2) Create a collection of found objects that depict natural beauty. List words to describe beauty and create a list poem that can be placed with your collection.
3) Using whatever media you wish, draw or paint your vision of beauty.
AN INTERVIEW WITH THE EDITOR
Q: What attracted you to creating an anthology about beauty?
A: It seems that all my life I’ve watched how definitions of beauty affect the people around me. Growing up, I never felt I could measure up to physical standards of beauty. I was short, my nose was soooo long, my hair was as straight and frizzy as Janis Joplin’s—and I didn’t even have her voice.
Over the next decade, models grew thinner and thinner. By then I was teaching, and I saw my female students attempt to emulate them. All these beautiful people, with curving bodies and wide smiles, seemed to grow gaunt and pinched.
Then when I had my own culturally mixed family, I saw how my children went through stages in which they compared themselves to their siblings. Their differences became perceived flaws, and they felt they came up short. Our culture had created an obsession with looks and with an ideal that is impossible. It seemed that, everywhere I looked, we were all in danger of losing our sense of ourselves as beautiful to something that wasn’t ideal at all.
Meanwhile, the world is full of such natural beauty—everything from thunderstorms that light up the sky to reveal startling sights, or gentle winds that push leaves in swirls against stone buildings, to good people with generous hearts and souls.
But sometimes, we get lost in our obsession with the airbrushed pages of celebrity and model “beauty.” We lose the ability to see the truly gorgeous aspects of life around us.
I wanted to gather writers who had demonstrated their own beauty through their written work, but also through friendship and through mentoring one another, to create an anthology that challenged cultural expectations and redefined beauty in broader terms, on their individual terms.
Q: When selecting the stories for this anthology, what did you look for?
A: I looked for stories that offered fresh perspectives through an individual character’s experience. I wanted each story to give the reader pause, a chance to reconsider what is, in fact, beautiful. I wasn’t looking for only stories about the physically beautiful; I wanted to see beauty in each story from an emotionally or even spiritually aesthetic perspective.
Q: Your very first story is about a physically beautiful girl, so beautiful that no one can relate to her. Why did you include that story? Isn’t it just encouraging stereotypes of beauty?
A: In order to live up to a physical ideal, those who support that ideal create expectations that become unwritten rules. The “beautiful” people in our world are given a tremendous amount of privilege and attention, but it sometimes costs them the freedom to be who they really are. Some of this occurs because the rules for beauty are that you must always be beautiful; nothing less is allowed, and nothing more is expected. You shouldn’t get your hands dirty, and you don’t need a brain. Don’t ever allow yourself to be ugly. Attention and admiration aren’t earned, because all that the beautiful person must do is be physically attractive. The beautiful person is shunned if he or she deviates from these expectations, and so that person is often made to feel shallow, undeserving, and isolated. Ridiculous ideals of physical beauty hurt everyone—even those who come closest to meeting them.
Q: You include stories in which characters behave badly toward others, particularly the older brother in “Sideshow.” How does behavior define beauty?
A: The stories that captured ugliness in its rawest form were those that captured truly hurtful behavior, which is truly ugly. To define true beauty, I thought it was important to recognize what is ugly. By arranging these stories next to stories that capture natural beauty or beautiful moments or behavior, true beauty is heightened because we can see the extremes.