Please, no photos

The one and only reason I'd have never made it as a fashion model

Every nine years, I write a book. When you do this, you need to get author photos taken. Not need-need, but you’re meant to do this. And done it I have: once nine years ago, and once just now, for The Last Straight Woman. (Which you should preorder, something something preorders good for authors, I lack the publishing savvy to articulate why but I know you should, also then you get the book once it’s out!) I’ve been fortunate to live in a big city with great headshot-and-otherwise photographers. The photographers have been delightful. It’s me, I’m the problem.

Whenever there is some opportunity to get dressed up, like a party or something, I get excited about it. I will look my best! I’ll break out the good dress! I’ll put on mascara and not just eyeliner! And then I do it, I throw my all at it, and am forced to confront, in the mirror and maybe in photos, what my best looks like.

And it’s not great.

It’s somehow worse than me not dressed up, combined with the fact that if it’s some sort of function, everyone is done-up-looking, so I’m no more relatively attractive than on a normal day, and possibly somewhat less so because this is not, currently, a big part of my life. I don’t know how to do makeup beyond lipstick and eyeliner. I don’t refresh my events wardrobe, so I’m always in a dress that’s 10-15 years out of date. (I now adjust for this by getting vintage dresses 30-plus years out of date, such that maybe the look is back.) I clean up terribly.

The looming of author photo day involved a sense not unlike pre-wedding for people who have non-City Hall ones. It felt like this tremendous event, confirmation that the book I’d been telling people I was writing for years was real. This is something authors pay for ourselves, and therefore not something I was going to set up any earlier, so as to jinx it.

I overthought what to wear, landing on the idea of a Laura Ashley dress, specifically the best-fitting of the bunch. This plan was subsequently vetoed by my mother, my husband, and the photographer. Maybe I should have overruled but probably not. I do have one well-fitting non-upholstery-looking dress, but it’s for going to a party in 1998, not for a headshot in 2025. A great dress but wrong for the occasion.

But what’s right for such an occasion? I really like the look of a pale beige-pink silk slip dress with a cream-colored cable cashmere sweater from a local vintage shop over it. Turns out this is a nice outfit in which I look like a middle-aged Jewish version of the Maggie, the teenage older sister from The Nanny.

Everything that seemed OK in the mirror at home looked off in the studio, such that I had to salvage things via a leather jacket I’d brought more as a warmth layer than for photo-shoot purposes. It worked, but when I think of all my clothes, granted 90% of which are objectively uninteresting t-shirts, I wonder, was this truly the best I could do?

Beauty-wise, I thought of everything I ought to do prior to getting these photos done and proceeded to do like 10% of this, and not necessarily the most effective 10%.

I got my teeth cleaned—again, not for photos but timed so I’d be in the best point in that cycle—and they still looked off somehow in the tooth-showing shots.

I got the scraggly ends of my overhighlighted hair cut off about a month ago, but I have roots from grown-out highlights. I don’t want more highlights nor feel committed enough to fixing this to dye my hair its natural dark brown, so the color situation is just odd. Not grown-out enough to look (as it might, soon) like intentional if dated ombré.

Makeup… yeah. I remembered that my concealer was from like a decade ago and had ordered a new one online, but foolishly thought to experiment with a different brand, and wound up painting my under-eye circles orange. I had meant to buy blush but never did, then it was the 15 minutes between a work Zoom and needing to leave for this photo so I used lipstick as blush. Given how often I have occasion to wear blush, this is probably the correct investment. Blush for me would be like a single-use kitchen implement.

Strength-training means I’m more fit than I was nine years ago—not something I’ve been doing for the photos but, couldn’t hurt—but I didn’t wear something sleeveless and flexing my hint of arm muscle so who would know?

The nine years older bit, however, is visible. Nine years, two kids, big drop in sleeping through the night, which maybe would already be happening for middle-aged reasons but in my case can be precisely attributed to child-related 3am wake-ups that, being old, I don’t rebound from. My vision however remains great, so I can see, with optometrist-confirmed perfection exactly what’s happening here. One of the things being the eye issue that had brought me to that practitioner, wherein my left eye is on-and-off red as if I have pink eye but it’s not pink eye, it’s just, I’m over 40 and this is how it is now, and I have not had time to get the mitigating placebo effect drugstore drops.

And the boots, right, now we’re onto that. A secret reason I was even thinking about let alone purchasing new boots was the knowledge that photo day was coming. What I, idiot, had failed to consider was that headshots (it’s in the name!) do not show your shoes. The silver lining to the silver-ish boots I had worn on a particularly arctic Toronto day was that they are, bizarrely, more comfortable than the black ones. (More the correct size, and a slightly lower heel, making up for pointiness.) Had I known this I may have passed on the black ones. But I did not know it, so I now have two new pairs of boots, as well as Labubus as far as the eye can see.

To be photographed in a way that shows you at your best, you have to contort yourself into positions that do indeed work well in a photo but feel unnatural when you’re in them. I’ve got zero choreographic memory or understanding, as comes through in strength-training classes, so I never knew where to put my arms, even when this was spelled out. I’m 5’2” and ordinary-looking, so despite being geographically at the center of things fashion-wise, the Manhattan-based modelling industry somehow never recruited me, like when the carpet-cleaning cult skips over George Costanza. I have no acting ability, no idea how to strike a post. This never comes up, except every nine years when it does.

Then, to determine which poses and then which photo to use, I had to look at all these pictures of my face, a face with flaws I’m sure are not (that) new but that I had not previously had reason to consider. I’m not going to list them here, but will instead just text a list of them to Kat. I was suddenly looking at my face with all the granular self-criticism of a teenager, except now with the added changes of midlife.

I once sat on the subway under a Rupi Kaur poem, one of those literature in the subway initiatives, and it was about wanting wrinkles. How Kaur, born in 1992, will feel about this when she has any, who’s to say (also, maybe the voice of the poem wants wrinkles but Kaur personally does not; how’s that for sophisticated literary analysis. But “wrinkles” isn’t quite it, ever, is it. If all that happened with aging were some lines at the corners of your eyes suggestive of having lived-laughed-loved then yeah, why not, sounds elegant.

And the irony of all of it is… this is the author photo for a book partly about setting aside what women look like and focusing on men, a mix of prescriptive (I think it would make straight women, in the aggregate, happier) and descriptive (it’s what I’m inclined to do regardless, despite it being supposedly against female nature to be like that). But the actor John Castle is not the author, so as much as I’d rather look at photos of him than of myself, this is what we’re stuck with.