Godmothers Gather: Stephanie Fairyington & Jane Ward

“The most raw, tender, against-all-odds story of parenthood that I've ever read.”

Author Stephanie Fairyington takes the stage to present “Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter,” her interrogation of life on the margins of American culture as a self-described “ugly” woman. She’ll be joined in conversation by Jane Ward, professor and chair of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

To defy the “pretty” imperative—the edicts about how women should look, behave, and think —is to experience a kind of invisibility. Early on in her motherhood journey, watching her young daughter begin to wrestle with beauty standards, Stephanie 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.

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 6. 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.

This workshop will be hosted in our third-floor loft space, which is only accessible by stairs.