"I believed my appearance was all I had to offer"

books:


	• Beautiful Stranger Hope Donahue Gotham, 2005 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 18 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Bandages

How can one publish a book entitled "Beautiful Stranger" - A Memoir of an Obsession with Perfection -- a story of a young beautiful woman who seeks out multiple plastic surgeries on her face -- and not include 1 picture? This is what it is all about -- her face --which is portrayed on the dust jacket as bandaged up. That is the way the author keeps it. How disappointing to find an essentially visual book bound up in only the printed word.
Let us know when you want true freedom, Hope, and send out a photo or 2. Or 3.

"I believed my appearance was all I had to offer"

Hope Donahue has written a tragically beautiful novel of obsession with appearance, an obsession that overrides even the smallest of life's everyday functions. Hope is beautiful, smart, a college graduate, a debutante: the girl you hated in high school and college because, on the outside, she had everything you thought you needed to be happy.

Hope's upbringing as a single child to a psychotic mother and a distant, rigid, puritan father wasn't helped by grandparents who were old-fashioned snobs. Hope was alone, and forced into adult roles before she was ready for them. In a way, Hope was never seen. In her own words, she writes, "A single moment of being seen can make up for a lifetime of invisibility."

The only thing Hope's privilege brought her was the money to disfigure herself with plastic surgery rather than cutting or hair pulling. What she writes about, very poignantly, is the feelings involved with being obsessed with what is in the mirror rather than what is inside. There are moments Hope describes as being unable to look in a mirror, too fearful of what she will see.

Hope writes of her roommates, "How are they able to go out into the world each day, fresh and full of energy, instead of crippled by fear and plagued by dragging lethargy? How is it I have lost the knack for everyday life?"

This is so true with many OCD's. Hope constantly investigates beauty magazines, looking for the perfect solution to her problem, becoming an expert on the intricacies of beauty history such as the recent trend toward thinness and the fact that geishas used deadly lead-based powders to obtain that whiter-than-white complexion.

Depression never entered the vapid heads of this particular social caste. To Hope, "'Sad' was what you felt when the dress you wanted at Neiman's was sold out. 'Depression' was what people living in trailer parks felt, people with missing teeth who drank malt liquor from paper bags."

While this book does get a little long in the tooth at times, but maintains a dreamlike quality, shifting through Hope's life like a ghost, through a life you realize you wouldn't have wanted in spite of the offered perks. I personally feel books like this should be required reading for our vulnerable middle-and-high schoolgirls.

Still searching, though more promisingly, for the safety and security she needs, Hope says that it is her awareness of her disorder and not the disorder itself that's changed. Her major awareness came through finding a therapist she could trust (unlike the quack her mother drug her to in her earlier years), and subsequently finding the medicinal therapy that worked for her.

This is a poignant and accurate story of one girl's fight for freedom from herself. It's an excellent book to read for yourself, especially if you're not "feeling up to the media", and a perfect book to pass along to your teen or pre-teen daughter. Donahue's writing skills are not wasted on this touching, heartbreaking tale of baring her soul. Enjoy!

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Plastic surgery is the symptom, not the subject!

This book is about the collateral damage of growing up a trophy daughter. I really think that's why there aren't any before and after photos. On the back of the paperback edition is a photo of Hope as a pre-op teenager and It is obvious that it is not the outside that needs fixing.

Hope Hathaway Donahue is the only child born to a couple of very privileged narcissists. Mr. Hathaway is distant and inept as a father. His big setback was not having the stomach to follow in his illustrious surgeon father's footsteps. So, he becomes a very successful international banker and a hypochondriac. Mrs. Hathaway is a lady of leisure who insulates herself within her own privileged microcosm, preferring to shut out all of life's unpleasant realities. She tries to turn beautiful daughter, Hope, into her living Barbie doll. In order to one up her rich friends she spends lavishly on gowns for coming out parties for Hope. The relationship takes a more sinister turn, however, when Hope becomes a teenager and Mrs. Hathaway's looks begin to fade. She begins buying Hope string bikinis. Since most mothers prefer modesty for their daughters perhaps this is Mrs. Hathaway's vicarious attempt to retain her nubility. It backfires when Mrs. Hathaway begins to see Hope as her rival rather than her ideal projection of herself. She then accuses Hope of being a temptress and Mr. Hathaway of having an affair with their daughter.

One day Hope comes home from French class and her mother, lounging by their pool, admonishes her not to burden herself with too much learning. In The Great Gatsby, Daisy, the fabulously rich narcissistic protagonist sums it up after the birth of her daughter: "I hope she'll be a fool, a beautiful little fool. That's the best thing for a girl to be." Primed to be a "beautiful fool" Hope becomes obsessed with physical perfection. She thus embarks on a long series of painful, expensive, and totally unnecessary cosmetic surgery operations.

Hope gets a master's degree in journalism from UC Berkeley. There is no mention of her trying to seek employment in her field, or having any hobbies or interests beyond her growing obsession with physical perfection. She develops a fear of and disdain for the world and like her mother isolates herself. Her parents support her for a while so she's not forced to get a job. She rents an apartment with several other girls, but doesn't interact with them and they dislike her. As they go off to work in the mornings she hides in her room and bemoans the sounds of the 9-5 rat race ever so thankful that she hasn't been drafted into it. She then rummages through their things, perhaps trying to partake in the outside world from a safe distance.

Hope's parents eventually stop paying for her plastic surgery. It doesn't occur to Mrs. Hathaway that her daughter's plastic surgery is a desperate cry for help or that she is staring at the consequences of decades of grooming her daughter to be the perfect physical specimen. She packs up her bags and goes to stay at hotel so she won't have to look at Hope's bandaged face. Her father has the same reaction, but is marginally more helpful. He remains horrified and distantly silent, but fixes some meals for Hope.

A reader from a deprived background might feel contempt for Hope, but is this situation so different from the 3rd generation welfare mother or the girl with a violent alcoholic father who grows up and marries one? All throughout this narrative Hope searches for love and acceptance. Her insecurities are often mercilessly exploited, most egregiously by a sleazeball cosmetic surgeon identified as Dr. S. What is most conspicuously absent, besides any parental warmth or guidance, is the mention of any close friends. Hope recounts her lonely childhood playing in her grandparents' large house and being treated very distantly by them. Hope gets into a "relationship" with Hank, who is secretly married and comes over to occasionally have sex with and abuse her. This lasts until he tries to rape one of her roommates and they kick Hope out. Faced with having to pay for her breast implants and the drudgery of a 9-5 job Hope then has a brush with the porn industry. Luckily she manages to walk away before becoming immortalized.

Hope eventually gets a job as a receptionist where she meets the love of her life. They marry and have four children. Aside from the surgery Hope has to have to repair the damage caused by Dr. S (his procedures were questionable), this is perhaps as close to a happy ending as real life gets.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

Hope Donahue seemed to have it all: beauty, wealth, social status. She was an only child who grew up with the best private schools, debutante balls, and a home in Hancock Park, Los Angeles?s old-money enclave. But beneath the family?s façade of ?keeping up appearances,? Hope hid a host of ugly truths, including a mother increasingly jealous of her daughter?s good looks, an uncle?s sexual advances, and a father who cowed to the demands of his wife and coolly reserved parents. Hope became addicted to a quest for physical perfection in place of her self-esteem?and by the age of twenty-seven she had undergone seven plastic surgeries. In riveting, unflinching prose, Hope recounts her downward spiral that alienated her family and friends, and led her to theft, bankruptcy, and a sadistic relationship before she began her recovery.

A powerful response to a culture obsessed with extreme makeovers and risky procedures that promise flawlessness, Beautiful Stranger is a timely, cautionary tale. Her story will inspire the countless women and men like her who struggle every day in a culture that feeds us dangerous images of unattainable perfection.

?Beautiful Stranger is a dark, scary, and important story of how broad social trends shape the suffering of individuals?how, in the author?s case, the beauty addiction of a whole culture is mapped onto a dysfunctional family and an obsessive compulsive disorder. Donahue perfectly captures the predatory style of a certain kind of surgeon?at once seductively flattering and solicitous and yet always on the prowl for access into the faces and bodiess of the vulnerable.? ?Virginia L. Blum author of Flesh Wounds

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