Local writer challenges beauty standards in “Ugly”

“I’ve always used my life to make sense of the larger culture we live in,” says local writer Stephanie Fairyington. This mix of the personal and the political is at the heart of her new book, “Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter,” out now from Pantheon. Part memoir, part social critique, it is a queer mother’s reflection on beauty standards, gender and sexuality, addressed to her 11-year-old daughter as a future young adult.

Fairyington and her wife moved to Sunset Park in 2013 and have raised their daughter here since her birth. I sat down with Fairyington at Yafa Cafe to talk about the book and her family’s experience in the neighborhood.

Fairyington’s initial inspiration for “Ugly” was Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book “Between the World and Me,” an exploration of race in the United States in the form of a letter to his son. After reading it, she asked herself, “What would the queer version of that look like?” As she dug into her own history, the idea evolved to center on aesthetics.

“I started to see how queerness and ugliness and femininity and beauty coalesce into these knots. I wanted to untangle them, because I think they sit in us like calcified, heavy things,” Fairyington says. “But if you take them apart, they start to have less impact.”

Growing up with a beautiful mother and handsome brother, Fairyington came to see herself as ugly. Her budding awareness that she liked girls, and accompanying sense of gender misalignment, got mixed up with this feeling of unattractiveness — and her self-image was painfully reinforced by the culture around her.

She says her daughter is the opposite: a good-looking, feminine girl who is into, among other things, fashion and boys and getting her nails done. Yet while Fairyington is grateful that her daughter will be spared being called ugly, she says being considered pretty can be harmful, too.

“The insult and the compliment are the same. Both are telling you your value hinges on your ability to perform pretty,” Fairyington says. “You start seeking that praise and can get lost in it. That’s what I worry about for her.”

In the course of Fairyington’s life — coming out, studying queer theory in college, getting married and becoming a mother — she has found the affirmation she lacked as a child and has seen through the cultural standards that caused her suffering. Yet a feeling of inadequacy and its psychological effects have lingered.

Ultimately, Fairyington is interested in transcending ideas of beauty and ugliness altogether, and that has a spiritual dimension for her. “When I meditate, when I’m in nature, connecting to something vast and unknowable that we’re all a part of, it creates a space between us and the culture we live in,” she says. “If you get that space from it, you can poke fun at it, you can play with it, you can reject the parts that don’t work for you.”

In reflecting on her and her daughter’s lives, Fairyington also tells a story about her time in Sunset Park. In many ways, she says, the neighborhood has been a great home for her family. They have LGBTQ friends and community, and she loves the park and the cultural diversity.

Still, as a queer family, they have sometimes felt unwelcome — as when a friend of her daughter was not allowed to have playdates with Fairyington’s daughter, and when another classmate repeatedly told her she “has to have a daddy.” Despite the support of teachers and the school administration, Fairyington and her wife moved their daughter to a different school where there are more families like theirs.

The book includes cameos from neighborhood kids who, like Fairyington as a child, didn’t conform to gender norms. I spoke to the mother of a friend of Fairyington’s daughter who is called “Enrique” in the book. He let his hair grow long, wore dresses and tried out different pronouns; he now uses he/him. Recalling her feelings at the time, his mother said she feared what the world would be like for him and became very clear in her own response. When a family member questioned Enrique wearing a dress, she answered, “I’m not going to be my child’s first bully.”

Enrique has since gone back to presenting as a boy by his own choice, but his mother says, “I still think about whether there was more pressure than what I saw or knew about to just kind of conform.” She is looking forward to him starting at a neighborhood middle school in the fall with an arts focus that she believes will support creativity in self-expression generally, including gender expression.

With the rise of “looksmaxxing” and what Fairyington describes as the Trump administration’s rigid notions of gender and anti-LGBTQ agenda, she says, “[The book] speaks to this moment. It’s a form of resistance to celebrate deviations from norms and affirm different ways of being in the world.”

In addition to writing about gender, sexuality and parenting for publications such as The New York Times and The Atlantic, Fairyington works as a substitute teacher. Despite the national climate, she is heartened by what she sees locally. “I’ve walked into Brooklyn classrooms where kids are making LGBT flags or wearing trans rights T-shirts,” she says. “I’ve been overcome seeing that. If I’d had that, it would have been really affirming. I would have been less alone.”