Remember Tara Reid?

They get the plastic surgery, but when they are photographed we don't see the scars.

Nor do we see the ravaged body years and years down the road.

I don't wear makeup all the time, but when I do I wear it for fun. Dressing likewise. I still have my "ethnic eclectic" look from college; it suits me and my profession. It's strange I get a lot more positive attention when I do grooming just for myself.

If I followed the advice in the book I shudder to think how old I would look.

I had two thoughts, first of all, while we all want to look our best, there's a study that says that beautiful women are significantly unhappier than plainer women.

The study stopped short of identifying the cause, but I can think of two reasons right off the bat: first, if the woman makes her living from her looks or relies on them for attention, etc., she suffers from a greater than average fear of losing her beauty. This fear turning slowly into reality can make her very miserable.

The second thing is that beauties are subject to a lot of negative attention from all the wrong kinds of people. They will be seduced and dumped by any number of playboys, but that is only part of the problem. If they are not smart and savvy, pretty women will generally end up in a very shallow crowd that values them only for what they look like. As for what happens to their husbands, friends, and (all too often) bosses as a beautiful woman gets older--well, they do not hesitate to replace her with younger, prettier women. No wonder she's obsessed!

Something to think about as we age, isn't it?

Secondly, I think the author's advice is only for these pretty girls scared of losing their edge. I mean, wow, does anything scream desperate aging woman more than fitted knee-length skirt, Botox, and an artificially colored, shoulder-length, "hairdo"?

Good grief, I'd look ten years OLDER than I am if I tried that. Yuck, yuck and yuck.

Being gorgeous is like winning the lottery--not all its cracked up to be.

"The dead mouse is offered on the side and cannot taint your wings".

That, my friend, is debateable. Possibly a matter of opinion.

is a great product.

not a pancake covering like foundation, has a little sunscreen, and it's good for your skin.

It's nice. Highly advised. Of course quality differs. I like Merle Norman's.

The overheated memoir market as compared to fiction, its probable link to the whole reality TV syndrome, and the ridiculousness of actually expecting the people who bare their souls to serve this market to be authentic (memoirs are varying degrees of factual, just as reality TV is scripted to a varying extent) has already been mentioned in the thread, so I won't repeat those points.

What I'd like to ask is why is the market like this?

I think people crave a proximity to some kind of authentic experience very strongly. Somebody mentioned that of course no white middle class suburban dweller has anything to say, beyond how living in the suburbs is a way of being dead while still walking around above ground.

Never mind that this isn't really true, that Sayyid Qutb isn't the true chronicler of the suburban experience. It's what people think and to some degree, it's what people living in the suburbs feel.

As long as people who are living marginal existences, as prostitutes, as abused children, as persecuted minorities, as drug addicts, etc. etc. etc. are understood to have discovered some great truth about life that the rest of us need to hear about, the memoir market will remain hot.

In the white suburbanite's search for some kind of authenticity, they have decided that everyone else is out there experiencing life except them. Maybe they are right; I don't know. So they assume all the drug addicts, etc. have something worthwhile to say, something to teach them about how to live, how not to be the unburied dead.

Thus the consumers of memoirs, the suburban and middle class people who buy books, are disproportionately disappointed and offended when they find out that some "reality" TV show is scripted or James Frey made something up, because they feel they, the people, have been lied to not just in the actual sense but in a larger, spiritual sense--their search for authenticity has been co-opted and all they find at the bottom is another corporate con. Their whole lives are made up of buying into the corporate con. That's what they are trying to escape from!

So naturally their anger seems a little out of bounds.

On the other hand, Frank McCourt's transgressions are one thing, James Frey's reach another level perhaps more serious, Augustus Burroughs or whatever his name is, is probably a damned liar, but to make up a Holocaust memoir? Completely? That's consumer fraud, and whoever published such a book in the first place should be charged with the same.

This would recognize the sad truth, that the latest corporate con is marketing unpleasant experiences to people who want to feel alive/real/authentic without ever daring to take risks and go through experiencing anything unpleasant. This group of consumers want their fodder to be "real" whatever that means, and when real is not what they get, the producer should be charged with fraud.

That way we can be sure that what the people want is delivered--real misery, real sodden pathos, real experiences, real "life"--again, whatever that is.

Strange, isn't it?