But then the word exotic when used with beauty almost always indicates someone who isn’t white but is considered beautiful by white people. So I may be hearing something different in the word.

Jackie, your comments about passing through periods of prettiness without recognizing them hit home. Not long ago, I was talking with an old friend of mine — a man — and the subject came up. I said, “I looked at some old pictures of myself from the 70s, and I was really cute.” He said, “I certainly thought so.” But at the time, I didn’t know it at all.

I don’t think it necessarily has to be confrontational, and if you’re writing in another time and place, it might not be an issue. But I suspect that even if you’re writing from a non-white tradition, but setting the story in the current or near future US, you have to deal with that tension.

As for your struggles in your own work: I have the same problem. It’s easy enough with major characters, because those get described. I don’t think you have to hammer it home with the terminally clueless. But how do you make it clear that a society is multi-ethnic and multi-racial without giving everyone a label? I don’t have good answers, but it’s worth thinking about.

Even though Justine describes Pearl as genuinely, objectively not beautiful, I still recognized my own experience here. And my experience was one passing through period of prettiness, but barely recognizing them at the time. I was desperately unhappy when I was at my “cutest” in college and high school–because everyone else was prettier, and that’s all that seemed to matter back then.

The older I get, the more accepting I seem to be of my appearance. And the less important it seems to be to my goals and dreams. Back in high school, being ugly all my life was just such a frightening, no-way-out, no-future-forward prospect.

And that combines with various things others have said here to make me wonder about exoticization. Is the beauty in the story exoticized? Or is it an extension of a Western beauty ideal? Or both, or neither?

…Re teenagers: one aspect of this might be the line “He was one who had cast off the stupidity of his teenage years.” And another: “You’re, like, a sexy older woman.” And the “boomeranging” thing in the third paragraph of the story. In my reading, there’s a lot of age and coming-of-age and growing-into-one’s-adult-self stuff going on in the story (and maybe even a sideways sort of nostalgia/longing for teenagerhood), mixed in with the beauty stuff (and plenty of other stuff, of course); I think those two aspects intertwine with each other interestingly.

I wanted to toss in a side note about the uncanny valley: there’s a lot of disagreement about what exactly is meant by the phrase “uncanny valley,” and the little research that’s been done so far is ambiguous about whether there actually is such a thing (under any definition). For details, see here:

http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2010/03/11/12737.html