Skin Deep

by Diana Wagman

Wanted: Woman to talk to. Three nights a week. Three hundred dollars a night. In this novel an unusual young woman answers this ad. She is Martha Ward, twenty-eight, an ex-topless waitress and part-time mother of an eight-year-old. She drives to Malibu for her new job and discovers she must dress entirely in blue - body, hands, hair, even her face, completely covered - and talk to a man named Dr. Hamilton. He wants to talk about beauty. This startling novel is the compelling and poignant story of a young woman obsessed with her looks. Defining herself by the reactions of the various unforgettable men in her life - her father, who speaks to her only in aphorisms and platitudes, her pyromaniacal stepfather, her dramatically handsome boyfriend - Martha becomes more and more absorbed in the demands of being physically attractive. Through their eyes, she begins to see her life of solitude and independence as one of loneliness and desperate routine. Only in her nightly sessions with the rema