Pretty Is Read Online Free

knew right away it was true. But I’ve ended up in movies. They say my face is better suited to the screen. You need a speaking face for the stage. Big eyes, a wide, expressive mouth, shadowy cheekbones, a well-defined, even prominent nose. In a way, says my agent, you’re too pretty. He doesn’t mean it as a compliment. He doesn’t even say beautiful . He says fucking pretty. And fucking pretty is perfect for certain kinds of parts in certain kinds of movies.
    The thing to understand about your character, a director once said to me, is that she’s beautiful, but she’s completely unaware of how beautiful she is. That’s why everyone falls in love with her. There’s this innocence at the core of her beauty.
    You mean stupidity? I said, laughing. He didn’t know what I meant, and proceeded to explain the whole concept to me again, as if I hadn’t been hearing it since high school, at least. She’s really pretty, but it’s like she doesn’t even know it! people would say admiringly of certain girls.
    Only then can you forgive a girl for being pretty: if she’s an idiot or a liar.
    There’s no way you can grow up in this world and not be able to look in a mirror and gauge how much you look (or don’t look) like the girls in magazines or on TV. Even if you somehow manage not to figure it out for yourself—because you’re so terribly modest or whatever—the world will tell you, just like the world will be sure to let you know if you’re ugly, or fat, or ridiculous in any way. I don’t mean people will come out and say it, necessarily (though someone will, sooner or later), just that they have ways of letting you know. You can see it in the way their eyes react to you, the way they interact with you physically.
    Unless, as I said, you’re stupid, or totally delusional. I’m sure that’s sometimes the case.
    It’s not a question of vanity, I argued with that director, knowing already that I would lose. I’m just talking about calling a spade a spade.
    He thought I was playing my character as too knowing, too self-aware. People would lose sympathy with her, he said.
    Sometimes I think we’re a whole country of hypocrites. And I’m one of them: I played it like he said, in the end. My character became some kind of cheesy male fantasy instead of a real person.
    And I still didn’t get famous.
    *   *   *
    I settle myself in a sunny window with a cup of tea, still in my robe, determined to read the script Martin has been nagging me about. He has told me it’s good, told me I’ll be excited, but I don’t believe him. His enthusiasm makes me nervous. I know his hopes for me are different from what they used to be, and I’m a little scared to learn what he thinks is a “great role” for me these days—a pain-in-the-ass mom in a teen comedy, maybe, or the clingy, shopaholic ex-wife in a romantic comedy about other people. Caricatures. I’m almost thirty. In actress terms, since I haven’t managed to become Nicole Kidman or Julia Roberts, that’s what I’m fit for: caricatures.
    The screenplay begins with a standoff between police and a lone gunman who has staked out a house in the woods. Two pretty preteen girls work on a jigsaw puzzle in the main room of a rustic cabin, their gazes turning anxiously to the windows. On the porch sits a man, gun in hand, gazing calmly out at the woods. The house is surrounded. As the police close in, the man ignores repeated commands from a loudspeaker outside, makes no move to come out with his hands up. The girls are frozen with fear. They are neat and clean, but oddly dressed: they wear plain, dark cotton dresses, and their long hair is long, loose, old-fashioned. They look vaguely cultish.
    There is a sudden commotion—we hear it, rather than see it—as the police descend upon the back of the house. The man lifts the gun.
    I read ten pages before I get up, go to the kitchen, and trade my tea for a bloody Mary. What I’d really like is something stiffer, but