Beauty Girl

A little girl longs to see beyond the scary sights on the sidewalk and the angry scribbling in the halls of her building. When her teacher writes the word "beautiful on the blackboard, the girl decides to look for something beautiful in her neighborhood. Her neighbors tell her about their own beautiful things. Miss Delphine serves her a "beautiful" fried fish sandwich at her diner. At Mr. Lee's "beautiful" fruit store, he offers her an apple. Old Mr. Sims invites her to touch a smooth stone he always carries. Beautiful means "something that when you have it, your heart is happy," the girl thinks. Her search for "something beautiful" leaves her feeling much happier. She has experienced the beauty of friendship and the power of hope.

The stories in Beth Ann Bauman's debut collection explore the secret lives of girls and women. The characters who inhabit Beautiful Girls are the timid, the not-quite-fabulous, the public school Ophelias, who yearn for something grander than their current lot. In "True, " an exquisitely shy teenager tries to fathom the hidden secrets of beauty from a boy who's "the prettiest person in the entire school." A lonely divorcee in "Safeway" wanders the darkened aisles of a grocery store during a power outage and becomes "certain a touch of rot had taken root in her heart...and that she still might live better." In "Wildlife of America, " a jilted New Yorker flees to the safety and comfort of the suburbs only to find that the wilds of New Jersey are the same as anyplace else. A hapless young woman loses her laundry in "Wash, Rinse, Spin" and must resort to the decrepit wardrobe she wore while working in B movies, as her dying father fades in her hometown. And in the title story, friendship and sisterhood are challenged as voracious girls who long for love and admiration participate in a town pageant. Told with irresistible humor and a cockeyed economy, these stories illuminate the search for love, friendship, connection, and identity. I live in a studio apartment in Manhattan on a very busy street. Sirens, car alarms, horns, squealing brakes, shouting, and laughter have been background to almost all the stories in Beautiful Girls. Over the years I've gotten pretty good at closing off this world and its noises and entering the worlds of my stories. Lately, though, I've begun to consider my various writing practices. I like to write in my pajamas, for example, which can be a liability when I'mworking on the couch and wind up napping. I also wonder about the direction I'm facing when writing and if this has any effect on the work in a feng shui kind of way.