The Weight of Beauty -

Neda Vukovic

Amazon

2013

99 páginas

3h 18m

ISBN-10: B00H2Q3X7W

“I was afraid I couldn’t live up to the image of the woman I had to be. Being a woman means being pretty, well-groomed, smart, caring, kind, happy, a mother, a nurturer, a protector, a lover, a friend, support and a teacher. I couldn’t be all of that! I couldn’t do it all perfectly! I was falling apart, looking at my life and feeling scared, paralysed by the mess in my past. I didn’t know where to start cleaning that pile of rubbish. “

The author has spent many years observing women who disappointedly gaze upon their own reflections in changing room mirrors, who suck in their bellies on the beach, and disapprovingly comment on their own bodies at the hairdressers or while sipping coffee with a friend. Why are we constantly being offered slimming pills, slimming tea, gyms and diets? Why hasn’t anyone ever bothered to get to the bottom of the problem – why are we suffering from eating disorders in the first place? Why are we eating too much or too little? Why we have developed an emotional relationship with food? Why are we feeling that we cannot live up to the expectations? Why we all feel so trapped in a cage of personal complex?

We are like the actress who takes of her make-up, her glorious dressand high heels after the show. When she sheds the robe of the Alpha – female, she still feels unable to face life on her own.
Neda Vukovic has written a novel about collective imprisonment within female mindsets, about fanciful glossy magazine dreams that shine but don’t promise to deliver any of the splendour, about an imposed wish towards androgyny and asexuality.
This is a novel that floats, sometimes easily sometimes turbulently, with tears and laughter, and every moment of it is genuine and real. At the end of the read you will feel like Audrey Hepburn in The Breakfast at Tiffany’s, when she wistfully concludes: “Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”