“Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for example.” –John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice  

I was never a Barbie girl. Femininity was not discussed in our majority-female household. Power was not feminine. Power was work, and work was done, and my mother, the Harvard-educated architect, worked, unlike many of my friends’ mothers. My mother was beautiful without any beauty routine. She washed her thick, chestnut hair with dish soap and rarely wore makeup. Red lipstick made her look like a movie star. The feminine mystery remained mysterious, and I longed for all things girly: frills, pierced ears, bracelets and two-piece bathing suits, pretty shoes, pretty everything. My mother’s aesthetic was Bauhaus, Frank Lloyd Wright; form follows function while I longed for curtains, pillows, and accessories. We had thin, horizontal, Venetian blinds, chrome and glass, and my longed-for canopy bed was a box built by her in the corner of my attic room, white plaster walls bare of pictures, a desk, a shelf, a window, a closet. Barbie would never enter our house. At some point, I was told exactly why — something to do with fetishizing the female body. The “last” doll my father gave me when eleven, a beautiful Sasha doll with tan skin and blonde hair, a sturdy body dressed in a corduroy jumper, was the only doll I had ever been given. I was the mother of a large group of stuffed animals of indeterminate gender. I also had a palomino pony I loved desperately. On the shelves of my room, I collected shells, glass animals given to me by our cleaning person, and pretty little things that were safe from the critical eye of my mother.

There were no full-length mirrors in our house. One could stand on the downstairs toilet (forbidden!) and glimpse parts of yourself or stand on a dining room chair and see your body from the waist down. I wanted curly long hair and was given uneven bangs and a Dutch boy haircut. There was Chanel N°5, but that was the extent of the mystery surrounding the womanly future. There was a high price for beauty taught to me in the constant reading of fairy tales with The Little Mermaid’s fate of walking on glass, Snow White, the targeting of the pretty one by the cruel sisters, the death of Anna Karenina and Nora: a Doll’s House and all the beautiful women loved by James Bond who were invariably shot or poisoned or painted gold so they suffocated. And my mother’s ambition was thwarted by her being female, so it made sense to reject most of those things, but I did not.

I sent away for everything, free lipstick, mascara, and eyeshadow, pamphlets on dieting, coloring your hair with lemons, and later henna. Beauty represented something I could not label, but its power was indisputable. With my babysitting money, I purchased fancy, sweet-smelling shampoo and anything that smelled of lemons or promised smooth skin or brighter eyes. My mother often told us, my two sisters and I, that we were beautiful, but that was abstract, while makeup was not. I didn’t want to be real; I wanted to be a Russian spy or Emma Peale in her leather catsuit or Twiggy, to have done remarkable things like Helen Keller and Shirley Chisholm but in a glamorous way. I coveted glamour, sexiness, and true love.

Then the braces came off, the baby fat melted, the cheekbones emerged, and the hair grew. Desire surrounded me, and my beauty was sometimes a weapon but more often used to hurt me. I didn’t want it to be real. My fantasy woman was standing alone, looking away, walking away, running away. You could not run in stilettos. When I discovered my father’s affair, I kept it secret, but he knew I knew as I had caught him with her, his whole self trying to say, “Daughter, I have stayed distant, but I love you.” I was suffused with rage and sorrow for my mother. He returned from a European trip with a gift, a hat, something so personal I did not know how to react. He said it reminded him of me and was fetching, flattering, feminine. I loved it. One day with a new boyfriend, we were pushing through a crowd in Times Square, and I held it in my hand and then let it go, watched it fall into the gutter, and only later told my boyfriend.

“He will never love me,” I sobbed.

My boyfriend reminded me of my first book deal, my life away from my family, my strength, and my worth, but all I could feel was loss.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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