Head Shot in the Dark

In which I panic about my author photograph

I have a new book coming out next year and a new publisher to work with. All these new things and yet the face I have attached to the front of my head, which there needs to be a picture of in order to promote the new book, is the same old one I have always had. In fact, it’s older than it’s ever been.

The new publisher asked for a head shot yesterday and I said that my current ones are seven years old and possibly not an entirely accurate representation of me anymore. I was hoping she’d reply and say my goodness no, you look just the same and if anything even younger than you did in these shots but alas she has working eyes and does not live inside my very vain head, so instead she said yeah, probs get some new shots done.

Now I want some Botox. I have wanted this for a while but inside me are two wolves and one of them is a feminist wolf who believes in ageing naturally and the other is a raging narcissist wolf who thinks everyone is always looking at me and wondering what went wrong with my face. (Both wolves are really pretty.)

It is possibly the disagreement between these two wolves that has given me really bad eczema around my eyes, and the itch of it has made me rub my eyes so much that most of my eyelashes have fallen out, leaving me to face to world like a naked, bald-faced senior mole. And not in a good way.

Even if I had eyelashes, the doctor says the eczema will be made worse if I wear makeup. This has only made things worse because eczema is exacerbated by stress and when I can’t wear makeup I look like a fatter version of my little brother, which is stressful because in my head I think I ought to look like beautiful woman, and my little brother does not go around looking like a beautiful woman (except when he went as Kate Bush last Halloween, and then he looked did like the most beautiful woman. Idea: Could I use the picture of my brother dressed as Kate Bush as my author headshot and perhaps no one would be the wiser?)

I mentioned the Botox idea to my nearly-fourteen-year-old daughter, to whom I have attempted to espouse only body positive views for a decade and a half. She was horrified.

‘You mean for your migraines?’ she said, because I have previously had botox in my jaw to alleviate tension which causes migraines.

‘Um, no, for my wrinkles,’ I said, like an idiot.

‘But you don’t believe in that sort of thing,’ she said, because the feminist wolf has been in charge of the microphone for most of her life.

‘I don’t not believe in it,’ I said. ‘I think people should be able to do what they want with their faces.’ But that didn’t go over very well. For two reasons, I think. Firstly, she doesn’t like change. Secondly, we have pretty much the same face, and so me saying I think mine needs improving might have come across as a bit rude. (To be clear, her face is perfection. Mine is like if someone left hers out in the garden for thirty years.) I suspect I could get some Botox and not mention it and she wouldn’t necessarily notice but I am a pathologically honest oversharer (yes, this is a terrible quality in a parent, thank you for asking), so I would be able to keep quiet about having facial injections for approximately six seconds.

Then there is the issue of my nose, which seems to be growing larger as I age. Is this the Pinocchio effect, from lying about how confident I am about my appearance to my children, so they could have even the remotest chance of growing up happy with how they look? If so, that seems unfair.

No amount of Botox will make my nose smaller. And while I suspect if I dig around on Instagram for long enough I will learn there is something I can spent thousands of dollars on to hoist up my jowels to less Rumpole-esque levels, I don’t think I can justify it.

Then there is the question of who I want to portray myself as when publishing this new book. My books are funny, but also dark, and they deal with such lighthearted topics as death, sexual assault, relationship breakdowns, ageing parents, and how to parent in this day and age. So, life, basically, it all it’s horror and glory. How do I portray myself in a still photo as capable of exploring all that in a commercially viable book? Smiling coqetteishly over one shoulder? Staring aggressively down the barrel of the camera. At this point I am leaning towards the pose ‘slumped in an armchair with my head in my hands’, only I worry that will make my tummy look fat. And head in hands means doing something about my nails.

Some would say that maybe all this worrying about my author photo is taking up time when I should be working on the edits of this book, and those people would be spot on. There is only so much resurrecting of long dormant blogs and baking cupcakes for Fathers’ Day cake stalls at school and replying to all the long-ignored correspondence from their accountant that a person can do before they have to face the fact that it’s what’s inside that counts, and what’s inside this book is the only part of this terrifying process that I can actually control.

Back to work I go.

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