Thank you to my favorite neighborhood cafe and hangout Le Libre Cafe — and its lovely owners Patricia and Herman — and our beloved local paper, The Sunset Post, for supporting Ugly and other local writers and artists in our beautiful Brooklyn neighborhood.

This is what my book Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter is *really* about — and my greatest hope is that it empowers women and girls to live and think against, and beyond, destructive forms of behavioral and aesthetic conditioning.