Ugly by Stephanie Fairyington

Join us for a conversation with Stephanie Fairyington to celebrate her newest book, a moving account of queer motherhood and an insightful interrogation of what it means to wrestle with "self-described ugliness." She will be in conversation with Svetlana Kitto, followed by a signing.

PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 pm.

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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
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 other publications. She lives in Brooklyn with her spouse and daughter.

Svetlana Kitto is a writer, editor, and oral historian. Her writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Guernica, the Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE, and elsewhere. Her book of interviews, Sara Penn's Knobkerry: An Oral History Sourcebook, formed the basis of an exhibition at the SculptureCenter in 2021, and was acclaimed by the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Artforum. As an arts writer and oral historian she has been commissioned to write about and interview many artists including Robert Morris, Nancy Brooks Brody, Barbara Hammer, David Hammons, and Frederick Weston, among others. With Dean Daderko, she curated the exhibition And I Saw New Heavens and a New Earth: The Partnership, Art, and Activism of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, which will open in March at Contemporary Art Museum St Louis. She works as the Editor at Dia Art Foundation, where she's edited monographs on Dorothea Rockburne, Senga Nengudi, and Renée Green.

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