Unlovely

I’ve been thinking about beauty. Physical beauty, that is. The kind that other beholders bestow upon us or that we claim for ourselves, and what it means to be a woman in our culture when physical beauty is altogether absent. The protagonist I’m writing is alone and unlovely, lost in a world of images the way Vivian Maier must have been in her attic bedroom after a day of caring for another woman’s children. I wouldn’t have been able to write about this character twenty or even ten years ago—...