Last year, Bri Lee published her debut work, Eggshell Skull, an award-winning memoir (and must-read) which excoriated the Australian justice system for its treatment of sexual assault cases and victims. This year, Lee is back with a riveting extended essay, Beauty, in which she addresses the beauty standards that women have been held to for decades and explores her own relationship to this part of our culture.

In Beauty, Lee talks with great honesty of her own experiences with eating disorders and diet culture more broadly and provides rich insights into the toxic thought processes and leaps of logic that keep unhealthy self-image alive and well in much of the population. It is particularly confronting to learn that the publication of Eggshell Skull and subsequent press engagements – that is to say, things that we readers were the beneficiaries of – had their own detrimental impacts on Lee’s wellbeing.

Beauty is written in large part in dialogue with two texts: Marcus Aurelius’ second-century AD Meditations, and Naomi Wolf ’s The Beauty Myth, first published almost three decades ago in 1991. Lee critically engages with both of these texts, picking out their arguments and applying to them a 21st century, post-#MeToo world.

While taking aim at the ‘dangers’ of ever-accessible supermodels on Instagram, of fashion designers and Victoria’s Secret, and of the diet and beauty industries more broadly, Lee is never looking at these from a position of moral superiority. Rather, she too has fallen into many of the traps of this machine and writes with compassion and insight about why this happens and why the cycle is so hard to break.

Though it might be clichéd to say so, Beauty is a deeply personal book and we, as readers, are extremely fortunate for everything that Bri Lee offers us of herself.

Reviewed by Gabriella Bate