The Book
No makeup.
No new clothes or shoes.
No hair-care products, no jewelry, and a man’s haircut…for thirteen months.
It was a rebellion that proved to author Phoebe Baker Hyde that she’d outgrown the fantasy of feminine perfection and had to remake womanhood in her own size and style.
From a review in The New Inquiry:
“There are plenty of reasons to recommend this book: Hyde’s skilled storytelling, the glimpses into relationships with her husband and the culture surrounding her…, the “relatability” of the narrator….The biggest reason is its Zen-like quality. Where I expected an arc of insecurity to security, there was a cyclic tale of relationship dynamics, liberations co-existing with expectations, mixed responses from friends and cultural pressures….The riddle of beauty is rarely as well articulated as it is here.”
From The Philadelphia Inquirer/Philly.com
“Hyde is bright and engaging, with a novelist’s gift for depicting social nuance with precision and wit.”
From Canada’s National Post:
“Phoebe Baker Hyde chooses to explore the personal, rather than institutional effects of the “female body as advertising medium”….the memoir benefits from time, and the digestion of lessons learned… She offers reasoned, measured and manageable changes rather than reactionary ones, allowing the book to reasonably dissect the airbrushed nation…”