Read on Twitter
Before this happened, I was going to write an essay about what it means to write the story of a woman’s life when you have no idea what she looked like.
Almost all biographies have the paragraph where they describe how the protagonist looked. The idea isn’t just that you get an image of the person in mind (Cleopatra with her curls and strong nose, Elizabeth with the flaming red hair)
It’s that so much about a woman’s life is determined by the answer to the question: “Was she pretty?” And so we get the description - beautiful, ugly, ordinary - as character. As motive. As destiny. As an explanation.
People always say about Tsuneno “Oh, she must have been beautiful.” As if that’s the explanation for the five marriages and four husbands.
And maybe she was beautiful. Or maybe she wasn’t. For ordinary people before the age of photography, we almost never know.
And if someone tried to write my life from my correspondence, they wouldn’t know either. You could read through my email and know who I loved, and what I read, and what I thought, but you would never know my eyes are green.
And yet even now, as a woman, the way I look (and have looked) has surely altered the course of my life. Maybe just as much as what I read and what I think.
It’s one of those frustrating things about writing women’s history - some of the most important information goes missing, the context is lost, the link between cause and effect is broken.
And when, even for the strongest, clearest voices, the best life stories, the most vivid characters, people ask, “But was she beautiful?” you can get annoyed, but you can never answer that it didn’t matter.
