Banango Lit

Terminally Beautiful
Christy Leigh Stewart
self-published, March 2011
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One holding a copy of Christy Leigh Stewart’s Terminally Beautiful will find that the back cover of the book seems to address the reader directly, let alone a bit scornfully:

Diana isn’t pretty like you.

She isn’t smart like you, or interesting like you.

No one loves her like we all love you.

You don’t need plastic surgery on your body or therapy for your brain.

But Diana does.

Diana has to go to a rehab for ugly girls while you are too beautiful for this book.

We hope you never die.

After all, according to the foreword by bizarro author Kevin Shamel, this book “will make you…thank whatever you thank that you’re not a character in it.” Yet on the same page, Shamel then forewarns, “Get ready to find yourself inside this book—Ms. Stewart has put us all in there.” This warning does indeed perfectly embody what makes Terminally Beautiful such a remarkable read: it is a story of inevitability; of the desire to resist that which cannot be escaped and escape that which cannot be resisted.

The protagonist Diana is one of many young women voluntarily residing in a rehabilitation clinic for ugliness, which may seem like a humorous bizarro fiction premise one would expect from Carlton Mellick III, author of such novels as Armadillo Fists, The Haunted Vagina, and Satan Burger. In actuality, the ugliness from which Diana hopes to recover is not quirky and amusing but sad and intricate. It is not only physical but also (and perhaps primarily) psychological, social, and emotional. Ever since a handsome stranger “had sex on [her]” one night (rather than making love or having sex with each other), Diana has felt like a kind of ghost, an empty shell awaiting any sort of fulfillment as she drifts from group therapy session to group therapy session, from one Xanax to the next. She requires doctors to tell her what her thoughts and feelings are. She smiles with her eyes instead of her mouth. She tells hollow lies to people only to immediately counter them with the truth:

“He’s been raped,” Anna remarks about him.

“I was too.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

But both the patients and the professionals at this clinic seem to carry a firm and unflinching belief that with the development of physical beauty (via “psychiatry, exercise, diet, and plastic surgery”), all aspects of inner beauty will follow. For some, such as Diana’s closest acquaintance Anna, the true pathway to the annihilation of one’s ugliness includes full gender transformation, but Diana looks and feels and is so ugly that not even a new set of genitalia can cure the vacancy and distress of her everyday existence. Thus, as Anna attempts to help her realize, Diana must take dire action in order to achieve the sense of belonging that she is supposed to want. By the end of the book, however, Diana discovers that what she truly wants is neither belonging nor beauty, but something else entirely—something tragic and wonderful and human. Terminally Beautiful is indeed an unsettling tale, but in the most powerful and skillfully told of ways.