TikTok tutorials, “Sephora Kids,” cloud lips and K-beauty‘s boom are among the numerous ways that beauty continues to enthrall consumers, but Vanessa Lawrence’s new novel “Sheer” (Dutton Books) goes beyond the surface of the industry.
As a 40-year-old self-made founder of the fictitious in-demand brand Reveal, the lead character, “Maxine Thomas,” has to maneuver around sexist investors, the churn of beauty trends, a fall from grace, a board review and hiding her sexuality. How a hard-charging college student started out in the ’90s by doing natural-looking makeup for affluent women in New York City before building a brand encapsulates much more than entrepreneurialism. The title of the 304-page book and its cover art, which depicts the traces of a woman beneath the smudges of makeup, hints at the layered story.
“Sheer” follows Lawrence’s first book, “Ellipses: A Novel,” which was set in the slick world of New York City media. Both works magnify power dynamics and the tenuousness of an abuse of power. Fashion, beauty and media are sectors that Lawrence knows well. Before earning an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she spent nearly 20 years covering fashion, society, beauty, art and design for WWD and W Magazine.
Lawrence said, “Physically speaking, makeup is very superficial. You put it on your face. You wash it off at night. That is intermittently superficial. But its impact on people is not superficial. It resonates deeply with people. It’s emotional. It can shape people’s identity and sense of self, and also how they perceive and interpret other people. That tension between physical superficiality and emotional depth and intimacy was one of the keys in approaching beauty in this book.”
The complexity, contradictions and ambiguity of the beauty industry appealed to her as an exciting focus for fiction. She said, “Beauty is very emotional in positive ways and in negative ways. It can be playful, self-expressive and pleasurable. It can also be dismissive, exclusionary or punitive. Sometimes those emotions co-exist — the positive and the negative — for the person wearing the makeup or using the beauty products. And they also co-exist for the person observing it.”
As a wink at the title, transparency is an underlying theme not just in Reveal’s products, but also in how transparent the narrator is being with readers in terms of reliability. Lawrence said, “That also comes down to, ‘How transparent is she being with herself?’ Transparency and honesty are points of tension throughout the novel. They are often now what they seem.”
The book’s cover hints at the theme of transparency.
Image Courtesy Dutton
Having come of age in the ’90s and the early Aughts, Lawrence infused some of her teenage memories into the book as a type of foundation. Think Allure’s “incredible imagery” and then on-the-rise brands like Stila, Bobbi Brown, Nars and Tarte. By her own account, Lawrence is not a beauty expert or a beauty editor, but she penned beauty stories at different points in her career. She said, “Just being in the [fashion] industry, even if you are not specifically covering beauty, you are adjacent to it and can absorb certain elements of it through osmosis.”
Set in 2015, and spanning nine anxiety-inducing days, Lawrence created the narrator carefully. Doing so, she was reminded of the refrain that she often heard from some of the actors and actresses that she had interviewed as a journalist: When portraying controversial or flawed characters, they told her, “You don’t judge the character,” she said.
Coming to fiction in her late 30s and 40s has been beneficial for Lawrence, since she has lived a little bit and has been exposed to different people and things, including so many people in her media career. One of her strengths is capturing the nuances of social and professional scenarios, which can sometimes reveal more than the characters themselves. She said, “I just try to absorb as much as I can around me. In the writing process, you just follow what excites you and what makes sense for the character. It’s really about paying attention to the different layers that are coming out of the story, which are exciting, can be built upon and can add meaning to the book,” she said.
Lawrence said, “You don’t need to be a beauty obsessive or aficionado to enjoy this book. There are different entry points to bring in readers from all backgrounds. There are places for people to come from all angles to hopefully find a place in this book that excites them and interests them.”
At work on a third book about friendship and betrayal between two adult women of very different backgrounds that touches upon some of the themes from “Ellipses” and “Sheer,” Lawrence said. “I hope that I get to continue doing this work, and people want to read my novels. I’m just going to try to make the most of what I’ve been given.”
