'comment dit-on "vibey"'?
Aesthetica by Allie Rowbottom (who has her own Purse Books to recommend!) is 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.92 inches.
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A few weeks ago, I was very into the impeccable children’s innovation of the “do-over”. If something went wonky, if something didn’t go your way, if forces of nature intervened: you commanded for a do-over. You got to restart the clock.
The do-over’s conceptual magic kept coming back to me all throughout reading Allie Rowbottom’s Aesthetica. In the novel, “Aesthetica” is an extreme surgical version of the do-over. The surgery reverses every cosmetic intervention ever performed on a body. It undoes lip fillers, nose jobs, butt lifts, Botox.
Aesthetica—a silky smooth novel, no snags at all— starts in 2032 (a daringly close future!). On the eve of her Aesthetica surgery, a former influencer in her mid-thirties recalls fifteen years of procedures—waxes and injections and implants—since she left Texas for Los Angeles to become an Instagram model in her teens (see the ‘Hippy Baby’ campaign below). During tense hotel room pacing and lobby pacing and poolside pacing, she also equivocates about whether to speak to a reporter investigating the main villain in her influencing life (a supremely slimy character soaked in Acqua di Gio) who prompted her first serious cosmetic interventions.
The sorcery that would allow a complete undoing is certainly a fantasy, as much as the redo or the do-over is a fantasy, but the undo is distinctive. The undo an abdication, not a second chance. Calling out for a “do-over!!” is full of determination and righteousness, its hope in the face of the impossible, it’s a protest and attempt to make the world fair, for you at least. Groping for an undo button has pitiful downcast eyes. It doesn’t even want to try again, it just wants to free itself from the consequences of past actions. This is all what makes the plea for the do-over, ultimately, childish—and the plea for undo, tragically, adultish. The undo says: we’ve made mistakes. We always knew Hippy Baby was a scam, but we wanted to see what would happen anyway.
Also, very cool, Allie Rowbottom recommends three Purse Books for us.
1. La Jalousie by Alain-Robbe Grillet for when you're feeling French, weird and...comment dit-on "vibey"?
2. Exposure by Olivia Sudjic for what it's really like to publish a novel.
3. Body High by Jon Lindsey, the ultimate purse book; fit it in even your smallest bag, open it on the subway, miss your stop because it's insanely good, keep riding until you've finished.