After being told that “Pretty is as pretty does” by her mother, Bebe Baker decides that “Pretty isn’t what pretty does. Pretty just is. Pretty is pretty and it can get you a few things. And it doesn’t last long so whatever the hell you can get with it while you have it, go ahead and get it.”

Having left Toledo with a jazz musician, Aaron, and bound for San Francisco, Bebe ends up in Los Angeles, where she works as a stripper. “All Aaron’s friends were jazzmen and phony intellectuals and chatty college girls. I would never fit in with them so I settled for the next best thing and acted the wild one – sometimes it was true.” Bebe always thinks that Aaron is chasing after other women because “That’s what happens to your eyes after you spend your nights in the laps of everyone else’s husbands.” But then Aaron and Bebe argue in a car and “a red minivan T-bones” them, and “They had to open the top of the car up with one of those huge mechanical can openers to get him out. It made a sound like ripping the sky in half”, and Aaron ends up in surgery. “After the strokes that stopped his brain, it was Aaron’s mother who signed the paper to turn the machines off.”

Bebe ends up in a drug rehab program halfway house and is also trying to become a cosmetologist. Before the accident, she liked “cheap chardonnay and expensive cocaine and vodka tonics and Vicodins.” At the halfway house she connects with an ex-Marine named Jake who sometimes thinks he’s Jesus (but is also magical and paints great pictures), and she’s labelled as having a major depressive disorder, a chemical dependency and an attention deficit disorder, and now she’s only “half a pretty girl.”

At Moda Beauty School (mostly populated by Armenian girls) or at Serenity, the halfway house, Bebe (originally Beth but her father called her Bebe) lives an unglamorous life, counting the hours until she leaves Los Angeles and goes to San Francisco, as her father had always wanted to do. She talks with her mother on the telephone (both of them trying to decide if the other is drunk) and hangs out with her Goth roommate Violet and beauty school student friend Javier. She creates pincurls and manicures and listens to lectures. She is looking for she-knows-not-what.

“I am a loser, I think. I lose things. Aaron, love, keys, jobs, father, Jesus, earrings, cameras, bank cards, friends, sunglasses. And I could lose this so easily. This tiny thread of hope, this tiny foundation of a new life.” At a halfway house AA meeting Bebe says “What I really feel is, I shouldn’t be here. Not here like here in this house but here like here on this earth. But here I am so what do I do now?” and she realizes that she’s said something real, but then doesn’t know what to say afterwards. She also knows that “we who are thrown here together by court order or probation requirements or various diagnostic criteria, we’re here to bear witness to each other’s lives, each other’s stories, to make sure we don’t disappear unheard, unseen.” Because for the moment Bebe is still in Los Angeles where “there are two kinds of people – servants and the people they serve.”

Jillian Lauren is a very original writer, one who writes in a style where because it’s important to her (whatever’s happening), it’s important to us, her readers. Her voice is filled with urgency because she herself is trying to understand “what it’s all about.” “Because I’ll always at least partly belong to someone dead” and “It is not the future I’m compelled by, it’s the past”, we feel her grief along with her hope. “I pretend I’m fighting to live in the present but really I’m having an affair with the past every secret moment.” But in the end, just like most of us, it’s the future that Bebe desires.

Pretty, by Jillian Lauren, released on August 30, 2011, by Plume (part of the Penguin Group), 275 pages.

Reviewed by Christina Zawadiwsky

Christina Zawadiwsky is Ukrainian-American, born in New York City, has a degree in Fine Arts, and is a poet, artist, journalist and TV producer. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Award, two Wisconsin Arts Boards Awards, a Co-Ordinating Council of Literary Magazines Writers Award, and an Art Futures Award, among other honors. She was the originator and producer of Where The Waters Meet, a local TV series created to facilitate the voices of artists of all genres in the media, for which she won two national and twenty local awards, including a Commitment to Community Television Award. She is also a contributing editor to the annual Pushcart Prize Anthology, the recipient of an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association, and has published four books of poetry. She
currently reviews movies for http://www.filmsay.com, music for http://www.musicroomreviews.com, and books for http://www.bookroomreviews.com.