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Other reviewers have acknowledged Lee's privilege as a young, thin, able-bodied, white cisgender woman and while I don't think this privilege necessarily disqualifies her from writing an intelligent, original and humane essay on the subject of female beauty, her audience is somewhat diminished by her failure to interrogate her privilege in a rigourous way.

As a very fat woman I found this book incredibly alienating- it was clearly not written with readers like me in mind. If I try and think of an analogous experience, reading Beauty was like being re-immersed in the exclusionary 'fat talk' which acted as a kind of social lubricant between my thin and 'average' sized peers in my teens and early twenties. It's meant for other thin, beautiful women and reinforces normative discontent with one's body size and shape while also seeking affirmation.

Since the book does not seriously engage with fatness or fat activism I found the citation of Roxane Gay's Hunger at the end of the book kind of disingenuous. I couldn't help but think of Gay's humiliating and cruel treatment by the Australian press when she toured here in 2017 in parallel to Lee's experiences of glamorous photo shoots, etc. while promoting her excellent book Eggshell Skull.

This is not to detract from Lee's brave, intimate, and at times unflinching depiction of living with/recovering from an eating disorder or the beautiful writing. But the attempt to kind of force the book into a neat arc of reconciliation with her body rang false to me.