Review by Laura Gill
Atria Books / August, 2019 / 256 pp
In the past few years, I’ve been playing a game with myself in stores with magazine displays. I call it “find Jennifer Aniston,” and it’s as simple as it sounds: I try to find Jennifer Aniston somewhere on the cover of a magazine. I started the game when I realized that it had likely been over fifteen years since I’d lived in a world without Jennifer Aniston on the cover of some magazine, and I was right; long after Friends, the culture is still obsessed with her love life, her age, her skin, her diet, and her hair. We just can’t get enough of Jennifer Aniston.
In Keah Brown’s essay collection, The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me, Brown writes about our cultural obsession with people like Jennifer Aniston—which is to say, our cultural obsession with white, able-bodied, pretty women, falling in and out of love—and how that impacts people who live outside the norm. While she doesn’t discuss Aniston directly, she explores the ways in which our culture’s disproportionate interest in white, able-bodied, successful people influenced her ability to see herself clearly and understand her worth.
Brown opens the book by reflecting on all that she is: a TV fan, a good friend, a twin, a black woman, a writer, the creator of #DisabledandCute, a Sims player, and a person with cerebral palsy. What she wants us to know is that not only is she all those things, but she is a person who deserves representation across all possible forms of media. For Brown, her concern is not only that she, and people like her, are often misrepresented but that she, and others, are completely left out, writing, “when you have [no representation], you get lonely, and the first thing you begin to question is your worth.”
The collection is wide-reaching: she moves from an essay on chairs to an essay on pop culture to an essay on crying to an essay on learning how to tie a ponytail. In each, she addresses her concerns about what it means to be herself in a world that is often committed to leaving her out. In her essay about how to put her hair in a ponytail, she writes about how important it was for her to figure out a way to do so, writing, “my ponytails feel like a revolutionary act, a celebration of disability and me. I will never blend in, and I am recognizing the beauty of that fact.” Even while participating in something so common, she is asserting that she will never be seen as common, not just because of the effort it takes for her to tie a ponytail, but also because of her body and the way it is currently seen in the world. While she admits to, as she says, “longing for conventional attractiveness,” she is also coming to terms with what her own attractiveness can and could mean: something revolutionary, something unique, something altogether new.
Brown’s ability to contradict herself renders these essays impressive rather than inconsistent. She acknowledges that her journey to love herself has been long, painful, and at times, seemingly impassable, which is why she feels conflicted about it still. In “You Can’t Cure Me, I Promise It’s Fine,” she writes openly about how much she has wished for a different body, writing that her belief in God was “resentful” and “contradictory.” She goes on to say she “thought [she] deserve[d] a cure, a miracle like those described in the Bible.” She was angry at God, and thought she was being punished. She prayed for salvation “from [her] body.” In the same essay, however, she speaks of embracing her body after a Facebook acquaintance posted about a woman with cerebral palsy being “‘healed.’” In that moment, she realizes just how damaging it is to feed into the idea of the “ideal of perfection” asking: “why can’t my spirit be disabled?” Here, we see an acknowledgement of the very real longing to be outside of her body, existing alongside an acknowledgement that the desire to do so is wrapped up in a skewed, societal pressure to be “normal.”
Societal pressure weighs heavily throughout the essays, and it is moving to read such an honest account of negative societal influence on a person trying to have a regular adult life. While people often say they are tired of the boxes society places us into, many making those comments speaking from a place of privilege. It’s more rare to hear from those on the outside, asking not just to be seen, but to have a seat at the table. And yet, Brown is not asking for anything but average adult experiences. Mostly, she wants to fall in love. In one of the most moving passages of the book, she writes:
[M]y thing is love: I miss being in it and the security of it without ever having had it. I miss the way it feels, tastes, and is…I am used to longing—longing for accessibility, for rights, for access to the spaces where I can advance my career, longing for the end of ableism and harassment online...However, this longing is harder to navigate the more time I go without having a romantic love to call my own.
It’s rare to hear anyone speak so frankly about wanting romantic love. Beyond that, the vulnerability with which Brown writes about it is poignant: she wants something she’s never had but feels like she might understand because it’s happened to other people, because there are stories about it that circle around her life. It is easy to forget the privilege of being able to become jaded about love, to forget that heartbreak is something to be grateful for. It’s harder still when those stories are told in movies and books where Brown’s body “will never find itself.” And yet, Brown is hopeful, writing, “I have got to be someone’s dream somewhere.”
When you scroll through #DisabledAndCute, you realize that even if Brown hasn’t found her dream just yet, she has allowed many others to fulfill theirs. The posts vary wildly and are often profound. She has provided a space where people can share their full selves and do so in a way that makes them feel seen and heard. She hasn’t stopped there. Brown is going to continue writing, not just books but also for TV, and she will continue to be outspoken about her community, herself, and the world she sees around her.
Toward the end of the collection, she writes that she’s excited to “help change the idea of what disability is and isn’t, to tell stories where we love and give stories where we live...we are human beings first, who shouldn’t have to be inspirations for our lives to matter.” I am grateful for her call, and for her work: I am ready to hear more about Keah Brown and less about, say, Jennifer Aniston. I am excited to know about the person Brown is becoming, because the life she’s “living is worth it even on the worst days.”
Laura Gill is a writer, editor, and photographer. Her essays and photographs have been published in Agni, The Carolina Quarterly, Electric Literature, Entropy, and Memoir Mixtapes, among others. She is a contributing editor of nonfiction at Hobart.