Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 434

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Look at Me," by Jennifer Egan.

Why didn’t I urge my friends to bring me casseroles and groceries and lounge with me on my sectional couch? Because I was weak. Oh, yes, that is the time when you need people most, I assured myself as the silence thumped at my ears. But you have to resist. Because once they’ve seen you like this, once they’ve witnessed your dull, uneven hair and raspy voice, your hesitancy and cringing need for love, your smell—the smell of your weakness!—they’ll never forget, and long after you’ve regained your vitality, after you yourself have forgotten these exhibits of your weakness, they’ll look at you and still see them.

“I’m interested in the relationship between interior and exterior,” she said, “how the world’s perceptions of women affect our perceptions of ourselves. A model whose appearance has changed drastically is a perfect vehicle, I think, for examining the relationship among image, perception and identity, because a model’s position as a purely physical object—a media object, if you will”—she’d risen out of her slouch and was sitting up straight, a spot of red on both her cheeks, discharging words in a cannonade—“is in a sense just a more exaggerated version of everyone’s position in a visually based, media-driven culture, and so watching a model renegotiate a drastic change in her image could provide a perfect lens for looking at some of these larger—”

As a teenager, I first became aware of people’s eyes catching on me as I walked down Michigan Avenue with my mother and Grace during shopping trips to Chicago. They glanced, then looked—each time, I felt a prick of sensation within me. I knew how transistors worked; my father had shown me a picture of the very first one, at Bell Labs, a crusty, inauspicious-looking rock that had performed the revolutionary feat of transmitting and amplifying electrical current. The jabs of interest I provoked in strangers struck me as an unharnessed energy source; somehow, I would convert them into power.