In 1978, aged 13, I had two priorities: writing stories, usually of a tragic bent, and avoiding PE. I had also acquired a secret and stubborn worry. In my school library one day, Alex Simmons, a tall, slim boy with perfect black hair and pretty features, leaned over my English textbook and asked me, not unkindly, why I wanted to be a writer. Didn't I know women writers were always ugly?
Perhaps it is important to pause here and flash-forward to the night later that year when Alex and bendy Beverly Robertson would win the local heat of the Disco Dance Duet competition, with Alex in tight polyester flares and a liberal lashing of mascara and lipgloss. Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that the last I heard of Alex he'd gone to modelling school and had had some success as a male "hand model." He was the only boy in my year who knew about "image" when most of us still thought it was something to identify in poetry quizzes.
"What do you mean?" I hardly dared look up from my chapter, "Great Writers of the Nineteenth Century." But stronger than my desire not to know a single detail more of Alex's thesis was my fear of where my ignorance would lead me. As it was, I was teetering at the edge of undesirability. I no longer wore the "little professor" glasses of my childhood—mercifully, the stigmatism had corrected itself—but my "baby fat" didn't seem to realise I was no longer a baby. My mother's defence of "puppy fat" made matters worse. "Bow wow," my brother accused across the dinner table.
My waist was nowhere to be found. After coldly assessing my shape, a male sales clerk in a jeans shop directed me to the "Husky" section. I had cheeks without any evidence of cheekbones. And I should never have had my long hair cut off to please my mother. My round little face widened instantly. I looked like a curly-haired boy with small breasts. Could I risk out-and-out ugliness?
Don't get me wrong. Even at the age of 13, I knew it was deeply wrong to care. I knew it would be weak to listen to Alex, the poisonous voice of vanity at my ear. I also knew he was saying that male writers could simply write, while female writers had to look good if they were not to fail as women. But if they looked good, if they spent time on hair, waists and eyebrows, they wouldn't be real writers. I was wise to both the double bind and the double standard.
And yet, still, nevertheless and in spite of all that, I so badly didn't want to turn out ugly. But with my aspirations to be a writer, I'd apparently put myself on a path where, if I ever turned heads, it would be for the wrong reasons. As Alex stared at me across the desk, my pupils quivered. I followed his finger (a soon-to-be much photographed finger) to the page at which my textbook lay open.
"Just look at her."
"Elizabeth Barrett Browning," I chirruped. "She married Robert Browning in secret and they ran away to Italy."
He came round to my side of the desk. "If by 'in secret' you mean he married her in the dark, I can begin to understand."
"She was ill! She had TB."
"That's no excuse for those loops of hair and hang-dog eyes. She looks like a cocker spaniel that's about to trip over its ears." He turned to a random page. "Aha!"
"Aha what?"
He turned the book so he could read the name. "George Eliot."
"Her real name was Mary Ann. She wrote Middlemarch."
"I don't care if she dedicated herself to world hunger. Look at that jawbone and that great big horse of a face."
I swallowed. I didn't know how to protect Mary Ann from Alex's relentless eye.
He turned to the next chapter and pointed. "Gertrude Stein," I offered dismally. "She lived in Paris and was friends with Picasso."
"Oh my God. She's a man."
"She is not."
"Is so." He flipped the page. "Now she's familiar."
I said nothing, but he found the caption. "Virginia Woolf." It was like the register of the doomed. "She's slim. And she's not absolutely ugly but she's definitely plain. Not so bad she needed to kill herself but bad enough."
I slammed the book shut.
In years to come, Alex would model wedding rings and car gloves while I would risk his curse—tragic hair, bodily chub, godforsaken eyebrows—as I started to write. Sometimes, his words would echo in my mind, like the threat of some hissy oracle. But by the end of 1978, my waist at least had revealed itself. My hair grew. After several long years, my cheekbones came out of hiding.
And in a twist that neither Alex Simmons nor I could have imagined that afternoon, a 1996 Sunday Times article would chart the rise of an apparently new phenomenon: the "literary babe." My first novel was just out. My then-editor was quoted. She would have claimed anything to get me attention. Eye, beholder, that's all it ever is. But finally I could rest in the knowledge that I was, at last, officially, at least as pretty as Alex Simmons.
I hold my hands up… I felt shallow, pathetic—but redeemed.
