"The Virgin Suicides', Sweet 16," by Nadine Rubin

(Photo and article courtesy: The Daily Beast)

Impossible as it may be to believe, Jeffrey Eugenides had so little faith in his ability to get The Virgin Suicides published that he filled it with the names of people he knew. “I was a virtually unpublished writer just playing around,” he says on the phone from Berlin, where he is spending the summer with his wife, the photographer and sculptor Karen Yamauchi and their 10-year-old daughter. “I had no ostensible hopes for it. My writing was a private exercise to please myself.”

Still, he had studied with the likes of Rick Moody, who was beginning to get published, and while Eugenides maintained himself by working as an executive secretary at the Academy of American Poets in New York, he wrote for two hours a night, four hours on the weekend and at every chance he could get during the workday. He was eventually fired for writing on the job, so he submitted the first chapter of his “private exercise” to The Paris Review as a short story. That was almost two decades ago. Today, the novel that resulted from that short story has been republished in paperback and holds its place as a modern American classic.

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"Size Doesn't Matter," by Nadin Rubin

(Image and article courtesy: The Daily Beast)

“I read the new Joan Rivers’ on the plane over here,” says Susie Orbach, the British psychoanalyst who is in New York to promote her 11th book, Bodies. She is referring to Rivers’ cosmetic surgery tell-all, Men Are Stupid . . . And They Like Big Boobs: A Woman's Guide to Beauty. “I pride myself on my knowledge of plastic surgery, but some of those procedures I’d never even heard of. She’s a woman in her seventies and her body is just so incongruous.”

Orbach is the anti-Rivers: At 62, she’s an attractive woman with crow’s feet and a forehead that wrinkles when she’s perplexed. The V-neck of the black T-shirt that she is wearing underscores her unenhanced cleavage, yet she is not looking to go under knife or needle, notwithstanding her recent separation from her husband of 30 years or the fact that for millions, as Rivers will tell you, nipping, tucking, filling or suctioning is as basic a part of a beauty regime as using toner. “I recently heard that brides are now offering their bridesmaids plastic surgery a year before the wedding so that it’s all settled by the time they accompany her down the aisle. I mean, hello!” says Orbach, widening her eyes. “We now see our body as something we can, must, and should perfect.”

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