During the press tour for Willing Silence, she’d said that she would never get cosmetic surgery. ‘I grew up in a household where money was made from women’s insecurities,’ she had declared. ‘And it makes me so angry. Why are we not allowed to age naturally, like men are?’ It went viral, her fans applauding Sam for her refusal to give in to patriarchal standards of beauty, but it was easy to make such proclamations when she was still in her late twenties. As she crept closer to forty, she found herself wincing at her reflection under the bright bathroom lights, pulling her face taut at the
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