"In my early twenties, it had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place. Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned over." 

For many young women, the saying "beauty is pain" is an all-too-familiar refrain. It is as much an accepted aphorism for our lives as a pithy justification for what our bodies endure, often in service of the male gaze. I hear the phrase reverberate from the social media posts that swear by the transformational power of a green juice or slimming diet; from the articles that claim exercise fads are the key to self-care; and from the mouths of girls in my own life when we discuss what to wear and how to act. When I poke, pluck, and prod at my body, trying to mold it into something that would seem pretty until I can’t tell whether I am doing this work for myself anymore, "beauty is pain" is the earworm that I cannot get out of my head.

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A Review of Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

“I no longer believed that equanimity was either tenable or desirable. It corroded everything inside. I had never met a person with greater equanimity than the former president. But this applied to all of them—to the prosecution and the defense, to the judges and even the other interpreters. They were able to work. They had the right temperament for the job. But at what internal cost?”

Words matter. They can start and end wars and relay the best and worst of our nature. Spoken and reserved, they reflect the intricacies of our engagements with each other. The unnamed narrator of Katie Kitamura’s 2021 novel, Intimacies, leads a life that exemplifies how language – and, more importantly, the power of the people behind them – can mold identities and change worlds. 

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