Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall: How I Learned to Love My Body by Not Looking at It for a Year, Kjerstin Gruys

Art Babbitt, Queen Grimhilde, 1937

(September 12) I read this because I saw Gruys interviewed on The Colberrrr Reporrr, and it sounded like a cool concept.

Strangely, however, I found it a dull read and struggled to finish. This in itself was interesting, because I could tell that if I had read the equivalent text as blog posts over the course of a year, I would have probably enjoyed it… in the way one enjoys blogs, I guess… as a little lighter weight than books.

And so I have concluded that what is entertaining detail in a 700-word blog post twice a week is tedious detail in a book. Often while reading Mirror I wondered about the detailed scene-settings offered when some of the principals discussed a vague aspect of the “project.” I kept hoping these details would eventually prove to be important to Gruys's experience of a mirrorless year, but they never were.

There was one kind of nice moment when Gruys has a dramatic epiphany about her mother-in-law, and that was well served by the reams of banal details about the MIL that had come before, but there’s no real sort of book going on here. There is no organization, no foreshadowing, no thesis presented, no shape at all. It is like a blog, but without the “benefits” of a blog, which include the live relationship between the author and readers, and the slow, authentic timing.

And, then, more seriously, I don’t think Gruys went very deeply into her topic. She was quite vague about her reasons for wanting to go mirrorless… she just talked about “living for her values” and such platitudes. She didn’t offer a detailed analysis of her mirror use prior to starting. Did she think she used mirrors a normal amount or too much? What would those amounts be? She seemed to think that everybody would get how weird it would be to avoid looking in mirrors for a year, like we’re all the same in our devotion to mirrors. What exactly is wrong with looking in mirrors?

I wanted the set-up: I wanted to know how Gruys used mirrors. Did she look at herself every 10 minutes to check something or did she spend hours on end practicing speaking and facial expressions to use in public or did she just stand around adoring herself? We don’t know.

Affects the whole story.

 Even more disturbing: once the project starts (and even well before the start) the word “makeup” comes up every other sentence. It’s not clear why that is her biggest concern… I mean, she says vaguely that she’s “vain,” but there are so many things to be vain about concerning one’s appearance, and she doesn’t worry about 98 per cent of those at all. I would be all worried about getting earrings on... and about whether I would be allowed to use a mirror to look for an eyelash or a piece of grit stuck in my eye or to examine the areas between teeth… and I think I’d be more worried about my hair not looking like a rat’s nest than makeup… or about my beard and mustache… yet none of these issues ever came up. It was makeup, makeup, makeup… planning a way to wear makeup without a mirror, going into a big theory and testing method to prepare for applying makeup without a mirror, on and on… was she covering up some real problems or was she afraid to look blah and tired the way everyone who stops wearing makeup looks? We don’t know.

And this is her doctoral dissertation topic!

Random peeves:

• Gruys seems to think that wanting to do girly things is the same as wanting to look in a mirror.
• Feminism is linked to using mirrors for vague reasons. 
• p. 16 -- a long passage about how she piled some new books she bought. Why so much detail about this? It's too much even for a blog post. 
• The "tradition" of “taking a good long look at yourself in a mirror on your wedding day” is a "tradition" I’d never heard of until this book. 
• p. 147: “How annoyingly self-involved I’d been” BEEN?? As I say -- there's no moment of truth, so it's hard to know what change she sees. 
• The fact that Gruys did this just before getting married seems to up the ante: so the stakes were maybe how lovely her wedding pictures would look? They turned out lovely -- but could they have been better?? I think only someone of her demographic -- age group, income level, fashion experience -- and a fellow Bridezilla -- would get the drama of this. 
•  I didn’t get the mascara epiphany on p. 152. 
•  She seemed to see herself in mirrors every other day despite this conscious undertaking. 
•  She didn’t seem to love her body in the end, which she often mentioned as a personal failing related to mirror-gazing. 

Colbert Report, I can’t trust your book recs.