A Face for Picasso: Chapters 23–31

I was always comparing my current face to what I had looked like in the past. Referencing my previous appearance allowed me to become my own benchmark in some ways.

After Dr. York and all the other doctors pointed out the flatness of our noses and the difference a chin augmentation could make, I became obsessed with correcting my perceived flaws—with being remade into society’s image of how we should be.

“They had started through the recollection of those dreams and been carried on as a means of breaking the monotony of classical body forms," she wrote.

“When I paint, I always try to give an image people are not expecting and, beyond that, one they reject. That’s what interests me. It’s in this sense that I mean I always try to be subversive. That is, I give a man an image of himself whose elements are collected from among the usual way of seeing things in traditional painting and then reassembled in a fashion that is unexpected and disturbing enough to make it impossible for him to escape the questions it raises.”

“If this for some reason does not work, we could try a more invasive approach,” Dr. York told me at our following appointment.

“I’m not going,” she told Mom, who was adamant that Marissa not alter any of her plans.

I handed them each a sample meeting itinerary and program to review.

We talked to representatives from schools that were public and private, secular and non- secular, in-state and out of state.

It was 2008, and in the midst of the recession, money was tighter than it had ever been before.

It would tie the outsides of our eyes to our skulls with wire and use fat and tissue grafts to fill our cheekbones, making the bones and the tissue deep within our faces more malleable and easier to move.

“Ariel, you have to stop calling Mom,” he told me.
A surge of embarrassment rushed through my bones. My incessant calling had upset her.

At a debrief that evening, our group leader asked us to pull our chairs into a circle so we could all face each other. “Does anyone want to share a bit about your experience and what you learned today?” she asked us.

I could finally place my eating disorder at the forefront and get the help I needed while I worked through the trauma at the core of my illness: my appearance. In the months following my last surgery, my recovery became my main priority.

When this happened, Picasso told her that she would be nothing without him. That the only success she would ever find as an artist would be in her association with him. When this did not dissuade her from leaving, he refused to ever see their children again.

If anything, Picasso drew inspiration from faces like Zan’s and mine, from our stigma and mistreatment.