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May 24, 2008
Dear Friends,
I've been thinking a lot lately about growing older, and what happens to our faces. You don't have to consider this question too long without coming up with reason why I've been meditating on that one. I'm fifty four years old. I have the lines to prove it.
But
in case that wasn't enough cause for me to be thinking about this phenomenon
that is somewhat blandly called "the aging process," here's
another:
Nearly all my life (since I was eighteen, at least) my writing has been linked to my physical image. It started when a picture of me appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, thirty six years ago last month, and for most of the last three and a half decades, the phenomenon has continued. I'd write a story about something I did, someplace I went, something I was thinking about. And some photographer would either be there, or follow up afterwards, to snap the picture. I was never a great beauty, but I think because I wrote so often about myself over the years, readers wanted to see the face attached to the words. It got to the point where magazines I wrote for were always dispatching photographers. "You've done this before," they'd say, when they took my picture. Yes, I had.
So if a person had nothing better to do, she might actually track my aging -- through a whole series of haircuts and bad perms, trips, varying body shapes, escapades with my children -- across the pages of a few hundred magazine articles and essays. There I am on the cover of my first book, Looking Back, barefoot in blue jeans at eighteen, and on the cover of my Domestic Affairs book, standing in front of the house I used to live in, at the end of a dead end road in New Hampshire, with my sons and daughter at my side. (I look unhappy, and I was. I had wanted my husband to be in the picture with us, and -- symbolically, perhaps -- he had opted out. Ten minutes before that picture was taken, in fact, I was crying. The children are smiling in the picture, but though I was only thirty- two when that shot was taken, I look older in some ways, there, than I do now. As for the boy on the tricycle behind me, and his older brother and sister, they're 24, 26 and 30 now.)
So many photographs: me and an infant Audrey, all gussied up in a smocked dress and propped against pillows in a New York photographer's studio, for a portrait that would accompany an article I wrote called "How it Feels to Be the Mother of the World's Cutest Baby." Me and that same daughter, eight years later, on Governor's Island, with the Manhattan skyline behind us, for a travel story about Taking My Daughter to New York City. Me and my son Charlie -- still in diapers -- with Dr. Benjamin Spock. Me and my husband on the deck of the QE2. Me and Charlie -- with his skateboard -- on a book tour in Brazil. (One shot you won't see: the two of us in divorce court. The two of us on the bench at our sons' little league games, unable to speak.)
There we are, though: me and Willy (a passionate tennis player with dreams of USTA glory) at the U.S. Open when he was ten. Me on a trapeze (a horrifying experience for me, but one that earned me an assignment to write about Club Med). Me hosting a yard sale at our New Hampshire home, right before moving to California. Me baking pies. Me in Guatemala. Audrey and me at cooking school in Mexico. Me with my sister -- reconnected after years of semi-estrangement. Look at the photographs, you learn the story of my life, or a fair part of it, anyway.
There I am, with Dolly Parton (my all time favorite famous woman). There I am, pedaling up a mountain in Italy with Willy, and teaching Kumbaya to a bunch of children in a Ugandan village, and huddling in a refugee tent in Kosovo with a twelve year old girl whose parents had not been seen for three months. There are pictures I'd rather not remember: most particularly, one of me tossing into the air the silicone breast implants that had resided in my body for several years, back in the early nineties (the ill-considered choice of a woman who had briefly confused the loss of her mother with the loss of her youthful breasts). That picture accompanied an article I published, sometime around 1997, about having those implants removed and reclaiming -- though only sort of -- my old body.
Of
course, we never do reclaim our old body, or our old face either. The
plastic surgeon doesn't exist who can accomplish that for us. In my brain
at least, I know this, and recognize that the best thing any of us can
do, about the inevitable process of growing older, and watching our physical
selves slowly transform as a result, is to embrace the process, not fight
it.
Still, vanity is a hard thing to give up on. About five years ago, when I first heard about Botox, I remember the horror I expressed at the idea of having poison injected into one's forehead for the purpose of temporarily paralyzing the frown muscles. What would women do to themselves next?
Then I started noticing how, all around me (keep in mind, I live in California) the women my age and older started looking so much younger, and more frown-free. Then I began finding myself in front of the mirror , stretching the skin over my own deeply creased brow, just to see what it would look like if I didn't have those lines any more. There was a glimpse of the girl I used to be. I wanted her face back.
For the next four years, then, I got Botox injections three times a year. The frown lines disappeared. I looked better. Though of course, once I was up on the dermatologist's table, I started hearing about all the other things she could do to improve me. Get rid of those lines around my mouth, for instance. Address that little problem around my eyes. My chin was holding up, she said, but there would come a time... I resisted, but I can't say I didn't feel a certain temptation.
Around a month ago, a friend (knowing I got Botox injections) emailed me a link to a new Italian medical study suggesting evidence that traces of Botox, injected into lab rats, were showing up in the brains of those rats. What does it say about the impulse of denial that I chose not to read this email for at least a week, until another three friends had followed up with suggestions that I take a look at this research?
By the time I did, I had actually made an appointment for my next injection. At first I thought I'd cancel it, but then decided -- given that I'd already gotten all this Botox already -- that I'd go one more time, to hear what my friend, the dermatologist's nurse, had to say about the Italian study. Maybe she had some impressive evidence rebutting the scary reports. If so, I was definitely primed to hear them.
When I walked into the office, I greeted my friend, the nurse, with a reference to the new medical reports. "I guess you've been answering questions about this all month," I commented, actually looking forward to what I hoped would be a convincing explanation of why I shouldn't be worried, and could continue getting injections.
"Actually, you're the first person who mentioned it," she told me.
Now, keep in mind I live in Marin County, California. This is an area full of educated professional types -- people who read the news, and care about their health enough to drink only bottled water and pay almost double for organic fruits and vegetables.
"Nobody?" I asked her.
She
shook her head. "And my clients are lawyers and business people and
teachers and therapists," she said. "Smart people. But they'd
rather not think about it."
"And what about the Botox company?" I asked her. Didn't they circulate some kind of company response to this?
Nada.
My third and last question. What about this woman herself, my nurse. Wasn't she going to try and convince me not to worry?
"Listen, I just work here," she told me. "I think it's nuts."
"So you don't get Botox yourself?" I asked her.
"Of course I do. I'm nuts too."
As for me, I got the injection that afternoon. But if photographs of me in the future appear a little less youthful than before, you'll know why. I may be operating on a brain with traces of Botox floating around in it, but I know when to quit. Though I won't pretend to have made my peace, entirely, with the ongoing process of not simply growing older, but looking older, as I do so. I name this as one of the challenges of the years ahead, for me: letting go of a stage of life I really left a while ago (I've just been resisting the evidence). Welcoming the next.
Meanwhile,
I wanted to share with you an
essay I published a while back in Vogue Magazine, about a photograph
taken of me by Richard Avedon, when I was nineteen years old. Really what
it's about is the power of a photograph to tell a story –- more of
one than we bargained for, sometimes.
I'm always interested to hear from you, on this or absolutely any topic that's been on your mind. I read every letter I receive, even when I can't always respond as swiftly as I'd like. So let me hear from you.
With friendship,
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