Description

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Writer/director/producer Justine Bateman examines the aggressive ways that society reacts to the aging of women’s faces.

“In her superb new book, Face: One Square Foot of Skin, Bateman invites us to intimately explore the fears that lead women to alter their faces to erase the signs of aging.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

"Through a selection of short stories, [Bateman] examines just how complicated it is for women to get older, both in and out of the spotlight." —Glamour

Face is a book of fictional vignettes that examines the fear and vestigial evolutionary habits that have caused women and men to cultivate the imagined reality that older women’s faces are unattractive, undesirable, and something to be “fixed.”

Based on “older face” experiences of the author, Justine Bateman, and those of dozens of women and men she interviewed, the book presents the reader with the many root causes for society’s often negative attitudes toward women’s older faces. In doing so, Bateman rejects those ingrained assumptions about the necessity of fixing older women’s faces, suggesting that we move on from judging someone’s worth based on the condition of her face.

With impassioned prose and a laser-sharp eye, Bateman argues that a woman’s confidence should grow as she ages, not be destroyed by society’s misled attitude about that one square foot of skin.

About the Author

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JUSTINE BATEMAN is a writer/director/producer with an impressive, decades-long résumé in film and TV that includes a Golden Globe nomination and two Emmy nominations. Bateman wrote and produced her directorial film short debut, Five Minutes, which premiered at the 2017 Toronto Film Festival and was chosen by seven more festivals, including the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Violet, Bateman’s critically acclaimed directorial feature film debut of her own script, stars Olivia Munn, Luke Bracey, and Justin Theroux, and was an official selection at the 2021 SXSW Film Festival and the 2021 Toronto Film Festival. Her best-selling first book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, was published in 2018 by Akashic. Face: One Square Foot of Skin is her latest work.

Praise For…

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Face . . . is filled with fictional vignettes that examine real-life societal attitudes and internal fears that have caused a negative perspective on women’s faces as they age.

— TODAY, a Best Book of 2021

With her new book Face: One Square Foot of Skin, Justine Bateman . . . is trying to push back against the notion that women’s faces are ‘broken and need to be fixed’ . . . The book is a meditation on women’s faces, and the cultural pressure to be ‘ashamed and apologetic that their faces had aged naturally.

— New York Times

[Bateman] studies the topic of women and aging in her new book Face: One Square Foot of Skin.

— People

There is nothing wrong with your face. At least, that’s what Justine Bateman wants you to realize. Her new book, Face: One Square Foot of Skin, is a collection of fictional short stories told from the perspectives of women of all ages and professions; with it, she aims to correct the popular idea that you need to stop what you’re doing and start staving off any signs of aging in the face.

— W Magazine

The actor and author of Face: One Square Foot of Skin wants to push back against the ubiquity of plastic surgery.

— Vanity Fair

Bateman asks, what if we just rejected the idea that older faces need fixing. What if we ignored all the clanging bells that remind women every day on every platform that we are in some kind of endless battle with aging.
— TIME; One of 7 People who Defined 2021