Book Event: Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter by Stephanie Fairyington

We are pleased to welcome Stephanie Fairyington for an event to celebrate the release of Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter! For this event, Stephanie will be joined in conversation with Renee Engeln.

A tender, moving, and insightful account of queer motherhood and an interrogation of life on the margins of American culture as a self-described “ugly” woman
“A rigorous ladyballs-out polemic that also tells the most raw, tender, against-all-odds story of parenthood that I've ever read.” —Mary Gaitskill, author of Veronica
Ugly is a word with fangs that can K*ll a woman’s self-esteem in one bite. Edicts about how women should look, behave, and think are the brutal forge through which they are made — not born — as Simone de Beauvoir famously argued in The Second Sex. And to defy the pretty imperative is to experience a kind of invisibility. It can be a hard thing to admit to yourself, let alone to your child, to say the words “I am ugly” or “I am seen as ugly.” But early on in her motherhood journey, watching her young daughter begin to wrestle with beauty standards, Stephanie Fairyington felt compelled to face her own demons and to unpack her own ugly self-perception, one that she could trace to her own childhood, in order to conquer this seemingly immoveable frontier, far too taboo even among women to broach: the ways in which women’s lives are unfairly contoured by the nature of their looks.
The multiple iterations of ugliness that Fairyington saw in her young self—her physical appearance, her formative gender dissonance, and obvious lesbianism—are not present in her beautiful and traditionally feminine daughter. But Fairyington’s old feelings of inadequacy take on new meaning as she confronts fresh insecurities around her role as the nonbiological mother in her relationship, exacerbating wounds from a lifetime of being treated differently, from the poverty of her genetic inheritance to questions about her parentage to doubts about the legitimacy of her family.
Interlacing cultural history and analysis with memoir, Ugly is a probing investigation into cultural norms and the formation of our aesthetic sense of self. Fairyington contrasts her so-called ugliness with her daughter’s attractiveness and adherence to beauty ideals, a tender and tenuous condition that her daughter was already walking a tightrope to maintain at age six. By sharing the history of her troubled self-image, Fairyington invites us to go rogue, to invent a new language and logic to overthrow all the ways that women have been cultivated to hate themselves.

Stephanie Fairyington is a journalist who writes on gender, sexuality, family, and parenting. A former contributing writer for The Advocate and former senior staff writer at Arianna Huffington's Thrive Global, her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Atlantic, among others. She lives in Brooklyn with her spouse and daughter.

Renee Engeln is a psychology professor at Northwestern University, where she directs the Body and Media Lab. She also serves as Associate Director of Northwestern’s Institute for Adolescent Mental Health and Well-Being. Prof. Engeln’s research focuses on beauty culture and body image, especially among young women. She is the author of Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women. Prof. Engeln’s research has appeared in numerous academic journals and in the popular press. She is regularly interviewed by media outlets, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic, Wired, Vox, and Rolling Stone. Her TEDx talk on “Beauty Sickness” has garnered over 850,000 views. At Northwestern, Prof. Engeln teaches courses on psychopathology, social psychology, the psychology of human beauty, and research methodology. An award-winning teacher, she has been voted to Northwestern’s Faculty Honor Roll for eight consecutive years. Graduating Northwestern seniors have selected her to deliver their “Last Lecture” multiple times. Prof. Engeln’s teaching has been recognized with both the Charles Deering McCormick University Distinguished Lectureship and the Weinberg College Alumni Teaching Award.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are strongly encouraged. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. If you need a seat reserved for you for accessibility, please email [email protected] To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. For scholarship tickets or other access needs please email .

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