Glossed Over Book Club: Jean Godfrey-June's Free Gift with Purchase

Last week, we celebrated our birthday.  And now we’re old!  Awesome!  One of our gifts was a copy of Jean Godfrey-June’s book, Free Gift with Purchase: My Improbable Career in Magazines and Makeup.  We didn’t open it for a few days because, well, we were busy studying the bags under our eyes.  But last night, we put on our glasses and succumbed to the siren call of the paperback.  We couldn’t hold off any longer. Godfrey-June’s column is the second thing we read in Lucky every month, right after Kim France’s letter from the editor.  And we had so many questions! 

• Would Godfrey-June’s aversion to plastic surgery somehow make us feel better about our aging face?  Not so far!

• Were the descriptors inside as shamelessly fabricated as the words in her monthly column?  Sure, if you count the use of “tint-y.”

• Would the book be crammed with lengthy go-nowhere personal anecdotes?  Well, yeah.  Like the book would even exist without boring tales from her childhood?

• And would she spill any insider dirt about Lucky?  Sort of.  But we’re only on the first chapter.  Hope abounds!

After the jump, the highlights from Chapter One.

I am not, never was, and never will be a beautiful woman. I’m perfectly lovely, and I feel confident in my powers to fulfill whatever sexual and/or romantic aspirations I might have. But turn-heads-take-your-breath-away beautiful, no.

It’s wonderful that she’s so self-aware and everything, but this is the second paragraph of the book.  Nice to meet you!

Of course, the requisite tales of growing up in Northern California crop up soon after.  Here’s a representative anecdote:

On a school trip to Angel Island when I was six, I had to be “rescued” from the shallows of San Francisco Bay when I refused to respond to the teachers’ aides calling me in from the shore: “Little boy, little boy…”

And that unfortunate childhood incident is just one of many reasons why Godfrey-June will never, ever cut her hair.  Every single other reason is laid out over the course of the next three pages, which are packed with similar anecdotes about being mistaken for a boy, all of which really drive home how devastating those instances of mistaken identity were for her. Which would have been fascinating had we cared in the first place!

The most evocative description in this chapter is about a floor.  Yes, really.  The floor of a hair salon, yet.

…—a cream-colored linoleum embossed with rivulets of gold sparkles than ran through it like ore—…

Ooh, pretty!

As a counterpart to that flowery depiction, there are plenty of nearly meaningless descriptions.  For instance:

I watched the bits of hair—featherish and a lighter brown than I associated with the hair on my head…

And:

My hair at the time was very early Kurt Cobain (minus the bleach)…

…which would be a timely, hip way to describe something, if we were reading this book in 1992!

Finally, the reason we’re reading the book in the first place—the dirt.

1. Jean receives between fifty and two hundred products a day. A day! (Which makes it even more incomprehensible that she singled out the adhesive square inside a pack of blotting sheets as newsworthy.)

2. She believes that not looking made-up “would be the whole point of makeup, would it not”?

3. And she reveals the truth about the quality of drugstore products vs. department store products.  Ready? 

In some cases, drugstore brands are better; in some cases, department-store ones are.

Helpful, eh?  Apparently, it takes real expertise to provide such a definitive answer.

Now, on to chapter two!  We hope that’s where she’ll explain why she doesn’t wear eyeshadow!

Comments

[jane]

i read this. twice. ahem.

she's just like every other beauty editor (with the exception of only a couple). they take great pride in looking like they wear not a stitch of makeup. it's like their apparent "natural-ness" makes them better--they don't HAVE to submit to trends, or resort to the artifice of visible eyeliner. I mean, I do partially understand--if you are at the front lines of the constantly-changing trend machine, you might do the makeup equivalent of wearing all black--just stick to simplicity. but sometimes, they just reek of holier-than-thou-ness--or like, because deep down, they are so worried about the superficiality of their job, they are overcompensating to prove they are down-to-earth.

[Maggie]

If you go to the Lucky beauty blog site, JGJ's contributions (they seem to have a rotating crew of bloggers) are often odd requests for reader's home improvement hints. How can I get this stain off my marble kitchen counter? How can I stop my shower caddy from banging against my shower wall? The answer, much to JGJ's delight, was RUBBER BANDS. There may be more by now but I had to stop reading.