Face value

You must have worked hard to project yourself into the mind of someone like that.

That was the way that it made me feel guilty. I felt sullied by the time I had spent in the brain of someone who might have liked to see this happen. As a fiction writer, you wind up imagining the perspective of all kinds of people who we might call demented or perverse. That's the job of a fiction writer, to be able to imagine anything, but suddenly the imaginative exercise of it seemed really moot in light of all this. I wished that the perspective of such a person were less available to me than it felt at that moment. I thought, Oh my God, this is what he was thinking of, the kind of thing he's hoping for.

Where did you get the idea for "Look at Me," the notion of a model whose face is destroyed and then rebuilt?

I started more with a collection of ideas, which is usually how it works for me, and also a sense of place. The first thing that I knew about this book is that it would take place in New York and in Rockford, Ill., which is my mother's hometown. It doesn't have a lot to recommend it except that my grandparents lived there. I found that after they passed away, when I was in my 20s, I kept having this urge to go back to Rockford. It was just nagging at me so I finally did.

I also knew that I wanted to write about someone in the New York fashion world because I was so interested in image culture. That's a lot of what the book is about and that seemed like an irresistible way to explore that. But I couldn't figure out how this woman and these nascent Rockford people would intersect. I went back to Rockford again and I was driving in a huge rainstorm from O'Hare into Rockford and traffic was stopped and I had this idea of the car swinging off the road and this woman's face being damaged and unrecognizable. It all came out of Rockford, oddly.

What about Rockford in particular was compelling you to go back and to write about it?

I was interested in the counterpoint between Rockford and New York. New York is really the image-making city and where so much of the media is located, and Rockford is really so apart from that. It's much more like a lot of America in that it always feels so very far from New York. I had a sense of wanting to somehow include both of those worlds in some way. What I found myself thinking about in Rockford, which is not something I had noticed as a kid, was the depressed, faded industry of it. The old dilapidated factory buildings by the river. It has this old kind of crummy downtown where no one goes anymore. I was interested in it as a place that had once been teeming with something but events had moved on and left this shell in a sense. There's a feeling of it being in the midst of an aftermath, and that fascinated me.

What made you want to write about people in the fashion industry? Was it the journalism you've done about it?

I took an assignment from the New York Times magazine in 1996 to write about the modeling industry and to talk about the way that our culture was totally obsessed with it at that point and specifically what goes on with these very young girls who move to New York, often with no education, to live essentially as adults and to pose as much older women in photographs. I was leery of taking that one because I'd done almost no journalism and who knew how long this was going to take and whether I'll even succeed at it, but I also knew that I wanted to write about someone in that world. I'd even made tentative forays into getting fashion people to let me hang out with them so I could do research: forget it. There are people in this world who are willing to help a struggling novelist, but the fashion people are not among them. This assignment seemed like the perfect solution. As it turned out, I liked journalism and have continued to enjoy doing it and that led to a whole series of articles.

I had know for a while that I wanted to write about fashion. I was interested in the evolution of media saturation to the intense point that we can all agree that it reached in the late 20th century and probably continues to proliferate although I think now there's a little feeling of maybe things settling down. Somehow there seemed to be no better way to look at that world than to look at a woman whose stock in trade is literally her image. In a symbolic, archetypal way it's always interested me, and my work for the Times only cemented that feeling. I was totally fascinated to learn that millions of girls all over the country really want to do this. This is what they dream of. It just felt important, something I wanted to look at very closely, both in itself and as an extreme version of a way of life I think we've all had to develop, which is a consciousness of our images and an ability to maneuver them successfully in order to function in this world we live in.

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