None of this was lost on me as a second-grader, who, fascinated as I was by the cleavage and teased hair I’d see on my parents’ night soaps, found Mary’s virginal prettiness a tad more accessible. I don’t really know what I look like when I’m writing but I imagine the weirdest thing my face does is frown a lot.

I always wondered what Lovelie was saying about me when she would slip back and forth between English and Creole. When I joined the small group, Daniel’s father, Emmanuel, was wrapping up one of his stories about his own father, an infamous Haitian farmer who grew the largest mangoes in his village. And then, sure enough, it came, in a graveled voice steeped in 1970s New York tough-guy movies: “Nice color. Back at the Fortress, King Everard and Queen Isabelle are enjoying a reign of peace, but what should be a time of joy is marred by the pain of childlessness.

The first one was interesting, but mostly just in the context of Mad Men: Don has plenty of character, but we know that indeed a chunk of it has been formed around his incredible looks. Daniel and I glanced at each other, waiting for the surprise dinner guest’s identity to be revealed. You spoke so eloquently; it took all of my might not to jump up and yell, ‘That’s my future daughter-in-law!

Her invention was cited in a toupee patent 43 years later, as well as numerous fake eyelash patents, so she was onto something. I was there to faithfully wipe his tears, speak life back into him, and prop him up to face another day. Save the occasional bully, nobody was telling me I looked stupid, nor was I looking at other kids on the kickball field and thinking they looked stupid when they were trying their best.Appearance is in and on our bodies, lending the fallacies of beauty the impression of visceral truth. I’d like to tell you that I watched a 7-year-old girl tripping on the hem of her angel’s robe, reciting scripture for the congregants to smile over, and saw that her prettiness was beside the point. It might allow us more genuine fluidity in our sexual lives—fluidity of orientation, libido, approaches to partnerships on the whole.

Is the teenage girl who looked in the mirror in 1968 and thought what so many teenage girls think about the way they look—is she there tonight, and is she shrinking? Other sources recommend eyelash trims, but for hygienic reasons; apparently 120 years ago people were getting all sorts of things wrapped up in their eyelashes. My main reason for switching from Blogspot to Squarespace is the commenting system: The spam filters at Blogspot are terrible, and I hated having to put restrictions on who could and couldn't post comments. In the same way, the Sex Myth has men and women alike attempting to appear a carefully calibrated line of “normal”: sexually deviant enough to be interesting but not so deviant as to actually be labeled perverted, ready and willing at all times but without any whiff of desperation. I was still a child myself, one who had always assumed that her level of emotional maturity matched her level of intellectual maturity, which it didn’t.It took me two weeks to walk without pain, like the little mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen's original tale.

Regardless of whether long lashes actually indicate a demure or coquettish demeanor, the fact is that if someone is peering at you through a thick fringe, you feel a sense of secretiveness: There’s a barrier there, one that separates eyes, those famous truth-tellers, from others who might discern how much truth is actually being told. Prettiness seemed like something for other girls, the same way some kids had grandparents who lived in the same town or got to have Froot Loops every morning if they wanted.Beauty Beheld is the third book in The Becoming Beauty Trilogy and also the third book in the Classical Kingdom Collection, a series of clean fairy tales retold to help readers find the long lost world of magic and destiny. Are you angry that you are dancing backward and in high heels and that it still comes down to how good you look in your ballgown? The woman who takes this approach to self-presentation might be just as much—or just as little—a “freak between the sheets” as her more publicly sexual forerunners.