Facial hair on women. It’s a thing. (Honestly, it is a thing. Yes, those are my tweezers.) Altman learns to be self-conscious about hers at the age of nineteen, when a handsome waiter compliments her ‘blonde moustache’. The paranoia lingers (‘If I caught myself in the right light in my bedroom, I could see a vague resemblance to Tom Selleck’). Now, at thirty, she’s wondering how to break the news to her fiance Dave (‘a wonderful man who is covered in hair. He not only makes me feel happy; he also makes me feel smooth’). How will he react to the news that women spend their lives fighting a desperate and losing battle against encroaching hair, spending vast sums of money just so that their men don’t ‘run screaming into the night’? Of course, we shouldn’t have to do this. But we do, because we feel compelled to follow the ‘societal standard that all women must be smooth, supple, hairless creatures’...

For the full review, and comments on other books by Altman, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2020/05/16/the-world-according-to-mara-altman/ ( )

Kindle Single - a pretty hilarious look at the fact that we're all in denial about our little bits of facial hair. As a girl w/ PCOS who's battled through allllll the treatments that are out there since I was 15 or so, I could so relate (meds? plucking? electrolysis? waxing? laser?), but I love the fact that her whole point was that we should just get over ourselves and admit that it's NORMAL. We all have some weird, and it's cool if we want it to go away, but the fact that we're all hiding in closets pretending it's not there is kind of odd and hilarious.

I'm down.

Coupla swear words. Pretty riotously funny. 4 stars. ( )

As a fellow hairy beast I had to read this. I could definitely relate to everything !!
The author didn't say anything that I haven't said, thought or felt. An easy, quick read that most of us with excess hair will understand. ( )

In Bearded Lady, a short memoir, Mara Altman talks about having unwanted body hair as a woman, trying to get rid of it (or not), and all the things that go along with that. She writes in a conversational tone with plenty of humorous touches that made for an engaging read.

Altman doesn't necessarily embrace the hairless ideal of current fashion, but she doesn't exactly reject it, either. What she does do is give voice to the frustration and dissatisfaction with the whole ordeal, the desire to just quit bothering and the reluctance to stop.

It was funny in bits, and other bits not so funny even though they were meant to be humorous - I think sometimes Altman was a little bit too crude for me. But it was definitely a topic that I could identify with, as can most Western women, probably. The memoir is kind of a fluff piece, so you don't really get any deep sociological or anthropological studies about the fashion (or shame) for body hair on women, nor does she go into a lot of detail about the history of what is fashionable and when. I think that as a memoir about her experiences with body hair, it doesn't need to have those details or studies, but I kind of want to read them now! ( )