Face: One Square Foot of Skin
By: Justine Bateman - Akashic Books, $27.95
Description: Face is a book of fictional vignettes that examines the fear and vestigial evolutionary habits that have caused humans to cultivate the imagined reality that older womens faces are unattractive, undesirable, and something to be fixed.
Writer/director/producer/actor Justine Bateman examines the aggressive ways that society reacts to the aging of womens faces.
Verdict: Ms. Bateman was always known to me as an Actor, from a quite wonderful acting family, and not someone who I would expect to have the time to sit and write a book, in all truth.
But here in the totally enthralling and wholly engrossing from start to finish Face: One Square Foot of Skin, her distinctive voice can be heard throughout, delving into the fascinating psychology of present-day fame.
Via a series of fictional vignettes (which, for the record, once you start reading you immediately start to create faces and bodies for of those speaking), Bateman takes this topic for discussion back to its roots, where, within the injured psyche of every human, lies the perpetual need for an upgrade as they travel through this world.
In this book, Bateman gives many a sobering viewpoint, taken from many a differing social media landscape, about how the need for overlook has to be brought forth about most decisions we undertake as life moves on.
Seemingly encouraging herself to go deeper at all times, to exhibit some fearlessness within her own self-examination, Bateman undertakes what can only be described as some brutally honest, often times assumingly cathartic acts of illumination for us, in an attempt to navigate the trials and tribulations of being a celebrity.
In closing summary, based on older face experiences of the author, Bateman, and those of dozens of women and men she interviewed, the book presents the reader with the many root causes for societys often negative attitudes toward womens older faces.
In doing so, Bateman rejects those ingrained assumptions about the necessity of fixing older womens faces, suggesting that we move on from judging someones worth based on the condition of her face.
Justine Bateman is a writer/director/producer/author with an impressive acting resume that includes Family Ties, Satisfaction, Arrested Development, and many more.
She has earned a Golden Globe nomination and two Emmy nominations. Bateman wrote and produced her directorial film short debut Five Minutes, which premiered at the 2017 Toronto Film Festival and was chosen by seven more festivals, including the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.
Violet, Batemans directorial feature film debut of her own script, stars Olivia Munn, Luke Bracey, and Justin Theroux, and was an official selection at the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.
Her best-selling first book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, explores societys need for its presence, and was published in 2018 by Akashic.
Official Book Purchase Link
www.AkashicBooks.com