Stephanie Fairyington knows that her book “Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter” (Pantheon) has an aggressive title. That’s what she intended.
“It’s a very aggressive, angry, queer point of view,” she says. “I wanted it to have that punch in the gut, like an Elena Ferrange novel.”
Her research drew on books by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Peggy Orenstein, Nell Irvin Painter, Umberto Eco, and others. But Fairyington grounds the work in her own story, as the daughter of a beautiful woman who always knew that others found her appearance sub-par, displeasing, or even ugly. As a queer woman who is now raising her own daughter, Fairyington wanted to write a book that blends memoir and cultural history to voice those ideas directly to her growing daughter — but she hopes readers of all ages, genders, and physical appearances will find something in it that speaks to them.
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“I’ve been thinking about these themes my whole life as a person living outside traditional paradigms of beauty and being queer,” says Fairyington. “I wanted to ground my personal story within an historical and cultural analysis. So it’s not just my story, it’s every woman’s story.”
“The more self-excavating that I did, and the more I saw my daughter being kind of shaped by this culture that really hinges her value on her ability to perform prettiness,” she adds, “I saw how queerness, femininity, beauty, and ugliness, all kind of crisscrossed into this knot. And I wanted to kind of untangle that knot.”
Fairyington’s daughter, now ten, is still too young to read the book. “She’s totally uninterested!” Fairyington laughs. But she hopes that readers will find in her work the tools to “resist, overcome, and transcend the ugliness of the world. I think the book is an argument that the world, the systems that create the feeling that we’re ugly is what’s ugly. I hope that by the end of the book, there’s space between these toxic ideas and us, you know?”
Stephanie Fairyington will read at 7 p.m. Tuesday, May 19, at Harvard Book Store.
And a few notes …
A couple of new novels come out this week from writers we admire. One is “The Foursome” (Mariner) by Christina Baker Kline (“Orphan Train,” “The Exiles”). Drawn from her own family history, Kline’s latest chronicles the true story of Sarah and Adelaide, the sisters who married Chang and Eng Butler, rich and famous from their appearances in carnival sideshows as so-called “Siamese” twins. Novelist Jess Walter praises the book as “a triumph of empathy and imagination.” And Caitlin Shetterly, author of the much-loved “Pete and Alice in Maine”, has just come out with “Gulf of Lions” (Harper), in which she revisits Alice and her daughters on a beautiful, if fraught, journey through the French Alps. Allegra Goodman (author of “This Is Not About Us”) describes it as a “tender, deeply felt novel, a love story about motherhood and coming of age.”
And in nonfiction, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Ada Ferrer (“Cuba: An American History”) has written an achingly beautiful personal account of her own family’s life before, during, and after the Cuban revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power. “Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter” (Scribner) chronicles the heartbreaking choices Ferrer’s own parents made when leaving Cuba for the United States when she was a toddler, leaving her older brother behind.
Kate Tuttle edits the Globe’s Books section. You can reach her at kate.tuttle@globe.com