Jillian Lauren

I love the post “Pretty Ugly: Can We Please Stop Pretending that Beautiful Women Aren’t Beautiful?” at Feministing.com. The author coins the verb “Liz Lemoning” to describe the act of perpetuating the media illusion that people like Tina Fey in 30 Rock are not attractive. Scott and I have had a running commentary about this phenomenon for years. Every time we see an Ugly Betty billboard we inevitably launch into…

Wow, she’s ugly. I mean she’s wearing glasses. And braces.
I know, and fat, too. What is she like, a size 8?

It reminds me of a conversation I heard once with Matthew Weiner, the creator of Madmen. He was talking about the importance of the characters within the world of the show actually acknowledging the total gorgeousness of Don and Betty Draper, rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. Like, oh, every neighbor you have looks like that.

Last night I spoke about Some Girls to a group of journalism students at NYU. They were a bright and incisive bunch and they asked a couple of really difficult questions. It’s interesting to me that the stickiest part of the evening wasn’t their questions about sexually transmitted diseases or even about my strained relationship with my family as a result of this book’s imminent release. Rather, the most uncomfortable moment for me came when I was talking about the real narrative drive of the book being my struggle to love myself. I told them that I felt confident saying that I’m a beautiful woman today.

As I was saying it, I realized that, in fact, at that moment I didn’t feel at all confident of that fact. Self-acceptance remains an ongoing struggle in my life and it helps me to read articulate arguments like this one about media messages regarding things like what it means to be ugly.

I’m in the air between NY and LA now, finally heading home to my little man, whom I can always count on to find me beautiful.

So I thought I’d treat myself to a hotel room because staying with friends wouldn’t exactly give me that alone time I’ve been craving. I think I’ve been a bit spoiled by the rock life, because I sort of feel like I’m in the youth hostel I stayed at once in London- the hostel in which I met a soon-to-be good friend by stepping on her head in the middle of the night because the top bunk was so sweltering that she had moved to the floor to sleep. At least here I have my own bathroom.

But the people are nice and the coffee is strong and I have to get out of here anyway because I promised Scott that I wouldn’t spend the entire day at the computer. I know that I’ve been working too hard when my husband actually encourages me to get out and go shopping.

It’s raining the kind of rain you can barely see unless you look at the drops sending ripples through the puddles. The kids in the preschool across the courtyard are making me lonesome for T. But off I go- into the rain. My plan is to visit my friend Shin at her store Lingo (my fave in all of NY) and then maybe find a cafe to have lunch. Then it’s off to NYU to speak to a group of journalism students.

Maybe I’ll step on someone’s head and make a new friend on my way out the door.

I’m at LAX alone right now, on my way to NY to do some press for Some Girls. I’ll only be gone for two nights, but it’s the first time I’ll be spending the night apart from T. I nearly sobbed when the car pulled away from the curb, but I have to admit that it felt like taking a giant deep breath just to pass by the Hudson News stand and not have to negotiate the store with a stroller, a carry-on and a baby screaming for yet another airplane toy to inevitably chuck across the aisle. The prospect of actually watching a movie on the plane or, gasp, reading my book, seems like such a luxury.

At the same time, I have the urge to talk to every mother here with a knit brow and an Ergo baby carrier. I’m you, I want to say. I feel your pain. I’ve done it a million times.

I feel guilty that I’m so unencumbered. Or maybe it’s not guilt. Maybe it’s the fact that I feel a little lost in this transitional airport space without my family around me. As if I’m missing a big piece of my public identity. I’m proud of being a mother who has learned to negotiate difficult situations like air travel with a modicum of grace. And yet- my book awaits me. And an hour of time before boarding. An hour. A glorious hour.

This is what motherhood has been like for me. There’s never enough time in a day to spend with my son, never enough time to write, never enough time for Scott and never enough time alone. I’m trying to learn to cherish each moment of the not-enough-time I do have.

The night I modeled for JJ Villard he was being interviewed by Miss Scarlet in The Parlor. If you’re in the mood to see some taxidermy, life drawing, red tights and a tour of JJ’s fridge, this video is for you.

If you’re pressed for time, this photo really says it all…

These three pictures were taken in the course of 24 hours. The first was taken by the artist JJ Villard. JJ has a show opening at Ghettogloss Gallery on April 23rd. I’ll be throwing a party there for the launch of Some Girls and we thought it would be fun to collaborate. I think that the pictures JJ shot of me kind of look like an American Apparel ad as envisioned by Wes Craven.

The next two were taken by my friend Alison Dyer. I think the one in our white Ethiopian garb makes us look like a groovy cult family from the sixties. You know, in the happy days of the cult- before it goes sour and the feds move in.

The disparity of my many roles often strikes me as comical. Maybe all working mothers feel that way, but probably not all of them get to pose wearing vampire teeth quite as often as I do. And that’s not even mentioning the daggers and the goats’ heads. I had to leave some surprises for JJ to reveal…

I’ll be posting details about the launch party and the rest of my tour dates soon. Just over a month to go! I’m not sure whether to do a jig of glee or barf from anxiety.

Junot Diaz writes here about becoming a writer. My favorite line:

By then I wasn’t even interested in a Great American Novel. I would have been elated with the eminently forgettable NJ novel.

I found this article by way of Sonya Chung (by way of Alexander Chee). The blog game of telephone. Actually, do kids even call that game telephone anymore? Do they call it facebook or something now?

Anyway, the gist of Diaz’s article made me go: Yes!, Yes!, that’s it exactly! Here is an excerpt:

I didn’t become a writer the first time I put pen to paper or when I finished my first book (easy) or my second one (hard). You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. Wasn’t until that night when I was faced with all those lousy pages that I realized, really realized, what it was exactly that I am.

I actually wrote two eminently forgettable NJ novels before selling my memoir. One of them is coming out next January, so I hope it isn’t, in fact, eminently forgettable. But I remember the same moment in my life that Diaz describes in the article: the moment I knew I was a writer. It was the moment when I knew, really knew in my heart that my first novel was going to live in a drawer forever and I went to my kitchen table to write the next one.

Well, I guess my memoir, Some Girls, is done because I’m holding a galley copy in my hand. It’s a strange feeling to see it looking like an actual book, after all this time during which it’s been my little secret world.

There was a bit of back and forth about the cover. The first girl they chose was too thin and looked like she was wearing a shetal (yiddish for the wigs Orthodox women wear). Nothing upsets this Leo like bad hair. I think this girl looks strong and that her gaze is captivating. I’m really happy with the final product. The design folks at Plume did a beautiful job.

The real thing comes out April 27.

I’m lucky enough to have an incredibly talented friend like Austin Young to shoot my author photo. He’s dreamy. And so tall and handsome, too. And he has pet chickens. The first picture is me with Austin, Trevor Wayne and the chickens. The second is me with Raina Antle (a hairdresser I befriended and stole from the band at the last video shoot) and Helen the chicken.

Trevor was modeling for the cover of Frontiers after I left. For his shoot, he wore a Louis Vuitton jock strap with suspenders. We arm wrestled to decide who would get to wear it, but he won. Damn him.

When I got home, I launched into my trillionth campaign to get Scott to let me have chickens. The verdict: no way, no how, no chickens. No chickens. No chickens. No chickens. Then he proposed building an Ultimate Fighting octagon in the backyard instead.

I guess I kind of have a final-ish draft of the memoir.

Whenever I get done with a draft, people inevitably ask me - aren’t you so HAPPY? Well, if I got HAPPY about things, I wouldn’t be a writer, would I? Mostly I feel a constant and overwhelming sense of nausea, interrupted by the occasional urge to make bread or knit a set of dishcloths or learn to play the banjo. For instance, I was up until eleven two nights ago making sandwich pickles from the few cucumbers in the garden that survived (most died a horrible death by sun-scorching). The pickles are awesome, if not quite as crisp as I would have liked.

I recently finished The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean Dominique-Bauby. Bauby wrote this wonderful memoir after suffering a massive stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome. He dictated the entire book by blinking his left eye.

Reading it, I felt a burden of responsibility to each sentence. My awareness of the effort it took to write the book placed a demand on me to be present for every page. Even the effort involved in writing a book with two good hands should bring that same kind of awareness to reading, but it doesn’t always. Sometimes it takes something as extreme as a book written with an eyelid to make us aware of the weight of words.

My attempts at gardening, however, have been successful in transforming the way I look at food. My poor squash, felled by powdery mildew. My poor lettuce, devoured by fat green worms. I can’t believe how hard it is. But my tomatoes, my tomatoes are glorious.