Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, as recommended by SE Harsha
beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino is great.
I pre-ordered Beautyland in an exhausted haze one night after learning it’s a book for weirdos about an alien born in the shape of a baby girl. I forgot I’d ordered it until it showed up in my mailbox, so it was a happy surprise and I started reading immediately to see if I would fall in love.
I did.
I remember the exact moment I read the excerpt shared in this post’s thumbnail. (You’ll find the excerpt below in a bit).
I was sitting in a chair in the bathroom while my almost two-year-old son took his bath. He was getting pretty mad at me for not watching him play with his plastic tuutles (turtles) while I held my breath during this pivotal moment of a story in which every moment feels pivotal.
I can’t wait until I can talk to my son about what I’m reading and he can give me his thoughts. For now, I’ll give mine to you.
The excerpt comes after Adina the high school alien gets ousted by her new dance troupe because she refused a sexual encounter with one of the popular guys. By not allowing her to join them in performing their heavily rehearsed dance (to the song “The Choice is Yours”) at Kaboom (“an all-ages club in the basement of a diner”), the troupe has just informed Adina she’s failed a critical test. The popular crowd will no longer be her friends, and she’ll no longer be learning dance routines with the girls, an after-school activity she thought she might hate but immediately fell in love with instead.
Imagine you’re about to perform for a dance contest with some new friends in a diner basement called Kaboom. Only minutes to go until showtime. You’ve rehearsed the dance over and over. Your body yearns to perform it.
Now imagine your new friends beelining toward you to let you know you’re no longer needed for the dance routine.
All because you didn’t want to have sex with someone everyone thinks is cooler than you.
“If she believed the boardwalk T-shirts, a woman was a ball or chain, someone stupid you’re with, someone to lie to so a man can drink beer. If she believed the television fathers, women were a constant pain, wanting red roses or a nice dinner out. If she learned how to be a girl from songs, it was worse. If she learned from other girls, worse still.
The bass notes of ‘The Choice is Yours’ begin, sounds that had until that moment filled her body with so much energy she thought she’d faint. She walks faster so she won’t have to hear the entry of the tinny, female voices promising, Here we go, yo, here we go, the looping This or that, the try or don’t worry or you can’t intervene, divine statements that beat her around the circle in double time with something extra in her body, for once, abundance. The song has flipped on her—she’s the one left without choices, violated and decepticated, no one running after her, no one calling her back.”-Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland
I pulled this excerpt from the first random page I opened, thinking I’d have to spend at least a bit of time finding an excerpt that resonated in the way things resonate when they warrant this kind of sharing. When I reread the paragraphs for the purposes of this post, I immediately and viscerally remembered my son in the bath trying to get my attention, his colorful plastic tuutles bobbing in the water, my breath caught in my throat at the last lines “no one running after her, no one calling her back”—as if reading them for the very first time was my own personal historical event, some kind of internal moon landing. So basically I now think I could’ve picked any random page in the book and found something shattering. The book’s that beautiful.
I don’t have much else to say but read this book. Adina sends reports about earthling life and human behavior to her distant planet alien brethren via an old fax machine. Her reports give me real hope in the world, not necessarily because they are hopeful (they’re sometimes pretty sad), but because Marie-Helene Bertino created Adina…such an empathetic, brilliant, tender, funny character with a truly unique but completely relatable perspective…during a time we may need her the most.
-SE Harsha
P.S. What about earthling life would you report to your alien family if you only had a fax machine and a few moments in the mornings and at night?
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