"Because of the reception of my lifestyle books and perhaps because I was born French, I am often asked to share my tips on 'ageing gracefully', an expression I don't like. 'Ageing with attitude' is what I believe in." Mireille Guiliano, author of French Women Don't Get Fat and French Women For All Seasons, is back with another account of femininity seen through a prism of ethnicised self-hate. For those who missed the previous volumes, French women don't get fat because they don't eat much, and they age well (hence "for all seasons") because they don't get fat.
Facelifts continues on the theme of Seasons, which is to say, French women keep their young attitude by a combination of delusional narcissism and a fear of obesity so profound that I'd say it amounts to a disorder.
"Forget crawling, walking with a cane, forget classifying old age as the third age of man; it can be depressing and diverting," she says. "We know a strong social network helps people survive cancer," she says. While her language is often opaque due to incorrect usage, its meaning is clear over time: refuse to admit your mortality and it will cease to exist. Your physical flaws, on the other hand, you should face down boldly every day, with constant vigilance and frequent mirror checks. Though there is plenty of open contradiction in the book – don't go in the sun, it's ageing; go in the sun, you need the vitamins: you don't need to spend a lot of money but you do need some shoes from Bottega Veneta – this central modus operandi is not a contradiction so much as an inversion of hard-won human wisdom. Forget about illness, loss, mortality; fixate instead on wrinkles, eye-bags, batwings. For this way grace lies.
One would not, however, critique a book about managerial techniques on the basis that capitalism stinks and no one person should be managing any other – one has to at least approach a book on its own terms. Stoutly, then, I put aside my belief that to approach your ninth decade still measuring yourself out by the kilogram and admiring glance is to be locked into a kind of indentured servitude to the patriarchy, sold into serfdom by the generation before you … (At least for the most part. I was saddened by this: "there is little doubt in my mind that the two biggest 'tells' of my 'identity' were my hair and shoes. Did your mother teach you that, like mine did?") No, if you're going to read it, you must do so on the basis that wanting to look good for your age is worthwhile and meaningful. Accepting that, why, exactly, don't French women have facelifts?
"Sorry to be a tease, but this book isn't about actual facelifts – or not having them." (That, naturally, would have involved looking up whether or not French women do have facelifts.) "It is about facelifts in the sense of ageing with attitude and the decisions one makes through the decades."
But let's imagine for fun that French women don't – this is not rooted in an ideological rejection of surgery as a tool of vanity. They are happy to have liposuction. Rather, they take the pragmatic approach that if you eat, sleep, work, play, have sex, shop, build relationships and plan all activities with a mind to making the best of your appearance, then you should be able to approach death without being so hideous that a scalpel becomes unavoidable.
Content is a problem, in so far as there is not enough substantive material here. All the beauty tips could be condensed into one article in Take a Break, so inevitably space must be filled by repetition. This might take the shape of the same thought being expressed two different ways in the same paragraph – Catherine Deneuve, for instance, "no longer wears stilettos or sharp red lipstick, and her clothes have changed too, and so has her hair", and, 50 words later describing the Deneuve of yore, "the picture was quite different: longer hair, thinner body, more makeup, higher heels" – or the repetition may be the same paragraph copied out as good as verbatim in three different chapters. Much space, somewhat outside the book's remit, is given over to very simple recipes. (One memorable example comprises leeks and water. Boil the one in the other. Drink the water. Eat the leeks.)
Much of the prose reads like it's been piped backwards through Google Translate (of her friend, tragically afflicted with an excess 35 pounds in weight, she writes: "one would say sloughing toward obesity as the limit of overweight in spite of her tall figure") and there is an airy carelessness in her distribution of information which, attached to a more interesting subject, could be construed as satire. Following the invention of Botox, "the phrase 'looks good for her age' seemed to quadruple in the country's lexicon". (Quadruple? Really?) "Fact: within one thousand yards or metres of my Manhattan home, there are at least seven nail salons." Yards are not the same as metres. Let's call it metres – that's a quite substantial area of Manhattan. There are probably 100 nail bars in it. I do not wish, lightly, to use the word "drivel", but couple these factless factettes with advice that is audaciously banal (to choose well-fitting shoes, you should try on both the left shoe and the right) and you have a work that is less self-help book and more a campaign of nonsense, some elaborate prank.
And if there is anything at all likable about the book, it is this mischievous boldness, the author's manifest belief that she can get away with anything – mostly bemoaning obesity, but also castigating women who dye their hair too bright a shade and fail to manage their roots – by simply amping up the Frenchness. "Bien dans sa peau," she says, again and again, as though the concept of self-possession will only penetrate the thick Anglo-Saxon skull through grinding repetition. "Isn't the best compliment a man can make about a woman 'quelle classe!'"?
There is a faux naivety, a childlike, pigtail-pulling delight at being able, as a foreigner in a strange land, to speak her mind, then spin around with an incredulous "Offensive? Moi?" I find it a little unbecoming in an adult woman, like a high-waisted tea dress. But I am most likely ageing with the wrong sort of attitude.
