All the beauty tips could be condensed into one article in Take a Break, so inevitably space must be filled by repetition. Rather, they take the pragmatic approach that if you eat, sleep, work, play, have sex, shop, build relationships and plan all activities with a mind to making the best of your appearance, then you should be able to approach death without being so hideous that a scalpel becomes unavoidable.Ĭontent is a problem, in so far as there is not enough substantive material here. "Sorry to be a tease, but this book isn't about actual facelifts – or not having them." (That, naturally, would have involved looking up whether or not French women do have facelifts.) "It is about facelifts in the sense of ageing with attitude and the decisions one makes through the decades."īut let's imagine for fun that French women don't – this is not rooted in an ideological rejection of surgery as a tool of vanity. Accepting that, why, exactly, don't French women have facelifts? Did your mother teach you that, like mine did?") No, if you're going to read it, you must do so on the basis that wanting to look good for your age is worthwhile and meaningful.
I was saddened by this: "there is little doubt in my mind that the two biggest 'tells' of my 'identity' were my hair and shoes. Stoutly, then, I put aside my belief that to approach your ninth decade still measuring yourself out by the kilogram and admiring glance is to be locked into a kind of indentured servitude to the patriarchy, sold into serfdom by the generation before you … (At least for the most part. One would not, however, critique a book about managerial techniques on the basis that capitalism stinks and no one person should be managing any other – one has to at least approach a book on its own terms. Forget about illness, loss, mortality fixate instead on wrinkles, eye-bags, batwings.
Though there is plenty of open contradiction in the book – don't go in the sun, it's ageing go in the sun, you need the vitamins: you don't need to spend a lot of money but you do need some shoes from Bottega Veneta – this central modus operandi is not a contradiction so much as an inversion of hard-won human wisdom. Your physical flaws, on the other hand, you should face down boldly every day, with constant vigilance and frequent mirror checks.
While her language is often opaque due to incorrect usage, its meaning is clear over time: refuse to admit your mortality and it will cease to exist. "We know a strong social network helps people survive cancer," she says. "Forget crawling, walking with a cane, forget classifying old age as the third age of man it can be depressing and diverting," she says.
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