ROUGE DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

Noelle chose the nickname Belle for her daughter, which is the French word for “beautiful.” In what ways do you think this set Belle up to be obsessed with beauty and vanity? How do you think this lays the groundwork for her behaviors?

Belle grows up disliking her appearance to the point where she is convinced she may even be part ogre. While this might be fairly extreme, in what ways does her comparison reflect our society and the ways little girls start to see themselves by a certain age? What in our world might contribute to this?

Belle’s narration includes frequent rhetorical questions she seems to be asking herself. She often ends sentences and thoughts with “remember?” or “didn’t I?” What does this tell you about her mentality or her state of mind as a child? Does this reveal anything of her as a narrator?

Noelle’s war with her vanity plays a significant role throughout Rouge. In what specific ways are her tendencies directly mirrored by Belle? What does this convey about self-image as a generational struggle?

Do you find that your self image is a reflection of your parents or the people you grew up with? Were there ever instances, positive or negative, that have stuck with you and continue to play a part in your confidence?

Belle watches Marva’s skincare videos almost obsessively. What do you think it is about Marva that draws Belle in? What keeps Belle believing just about everything Marva says?

Do you find that you are easily influenced in the way Belle seems to be when it comes to beauty products? What is it that usually convinces you that you need to buy/use something? Is this a habit you would ideally like to see yourself break?

Noelle often makes judgmental remarks about Belle’s beauty regimens and gimmicks—such as her collagen smoothies—despite having her own identical behaviors. What might cause a parent to look down upon something their child does despite doing it themselves? Do you think this is intentional or something Noelle does without realizing?

Rouge uses many scent descriptors, with particular scents often being attributed to specific characters or settings. What do you think those scent pairings (such as Noelle’s smoke and violets) represent when it comes to that character or location? What are some scents that you associate with a certain person or place, and what does it make you feel when you smell them?

Even before her treatments there are times where it seems Belle has some gaps in her memory and can’t quite pinpoint where some of her knowledge comes from or why she cannot remember parts of her past. What might elicit this response from a person, and what does it tell us about Belle’s life even before her the reasons for her memory loss are detailed to us?

Belle describes her morning routine as being “all about protection” and a way to “arm ourselves for the day” (99). Is there anything you do daily that you might consider a means of “arming” yourself? What about that particular thing makes you feel protected?

During Belle’s first free treatment at Rouge, the “whispering woman” explains how “memory and skin go hand in hand” (136)—that with good memories comes good skin, and with bad memories comes bad skin. While there is no truth to this statement in real life, many times we do have physical reminders of our memories. Do you have any memories, good or bad, that have left you with physical reminders?

Belle mentions feeling like her white mother is a liar and a thief whenever she sees her dressing or making herself up to look Egyptian, as this look is a choice for her mother where it isn’t for Belle. She also repeatedly used the word “whiteness” instead of “brightness” when talking about the Glow. What does this imply about the way Belle sees race in relation to beauty?

What is the significance of the jellyfish that Rouge keeps in its establishment?

The color red is pointed out consistently throughout Rouge. What might the color symbolize in the context of this story? What does it seem to imply whenever it is used?

There is a great deal that must be sacrificed in order to obtain “the Glow” from Rouge and become your “Most Magnificent Self.” However, many of the Rouge patrons and employees claim it is all worth it. Does this speak to the ways our own society operates as well? How far do you think most people in the real world are willing to go for beauty?

Sylvia eventually tells Belle she is looking better lately. When Belle presses and asks Sylvia how she looks, she replies, “Like you” (360). Do you think Belle is any closer to truly being her “Most Magnificent Self” in the end? How do you think her journey has affected her general view of her mother, grief, and beauty?

What would it look like for someone to actually become their “Most Magnificent Self” in the real world? What are some traits your “Most Magnificent Self” would have?

How did this story make you feel about vanity? Is there an overall message to be learned in this book that we can reflect on and apply to our own relationships with beauty and self-image?

ROUGE ENHANCE YOUR GROUP ACTIVITIES:

Rouge opens with Belle’s mother retelling her favorite fairy tale to her—one that she’s clearly heard many times and that means something to her while contributing to the tone of her life. Think of a story or a book that meant something to you as a child. Jot down reasons you think the story stuck with you and ways in which it may have contributed to who you were. Revisit the story and see what sticks out to you now.

Much of this novel has to do with seeking to change yourself on the outside as a way to avoid or cope with deeper, internal issues. Try making a list of five positive affirmations you can repeat to yourself whenever you are feeling insecure or vulnerable. You can find inspiration at https://www.oprahdaily.com/life/a40709244/affirmations-for-self-love/.

While it can certainly be taken too far as we saw in Rouge, indulging in beauty products can be fun in healthy doses. Consider having a group pamper session with DIY face masks. While using them, reflect on the things you appreciate about yourself, both inside and out, and share as you feel comfortable. Here is a recipe for homemade face masks you can make as a group. https://www.lofficielusa.com/beauty/best-diy-face-masks-skincare

Q&A with Mona Awad

on Rouge

Q. You’ve shared that Rouge grew out of your interest in envy. Why do you think so few novels focus on envy? How do you feel your characters allowed you to explore the destabilizing, often all-encompassing impact of envy?

Envy is such a fundamental part of being human, particularly in the age of social media. But few novels explore envy, I think, because it’s a difficult thing to talk about. There’s a lot of shame around envy; it’s ugly, yet we all feel it, we’re all vulnerable to it, and it reveals us in ways we don’t like. And who determines what is enviable, what is beautiful, what is desirable? My protagonist, Belle, who is biracial, envies her mother Noelle’s beauty and her whiteness from a young age. Envy makes her into a kind of monster: it consumes her. I was interested in the kind of monster that envy creates, how envy drives and destroys us, how it hums beneath the surface of our everyday dynamics and interactions, our fixations. What makes us envy others and what does envy make us? How do the internet, movies, and the beauty industry feed this dark human impulse? I started thinking about this novel when I became addicted to skincare videos on YouTube during the pandemic, great fodder for envy. I’ve also always wanted to work with the fairy tale “Snow White,” a brilliant story about envy (and whiteness). Belle and her mother were well suited to that dynamic.

Q. Rouge has been described as “‘Snow White’ meets Eyes Wide Shut.” How do fairy tales play a role in your work, especially in this novel?

I love fairy tales because they use symbolic language to depict emotional and psychological realities that we all face: coming-of-age crises; parent-child conflicts; longing for freedom and change. They are unreal points of entry into very real fears and desires, and I think that’s why we keep returning to them. In all my books, I’m interested in how fantasy can reveal reality quite profoundly. “Snow White” has always fascinated me: a dark mother-daughter psychodrama with beauty and envy as its engine and a rich language of symbols and colors (red, black, and white). It also depicts something beautiful, moving, and true about mothers and daughters. Belle and Noelle love each other, but there’s darkness there brought in by the mirror, an agent of chaos and conflict. I love that triangulation in the fairy tale because it’s so mysterious and creepy. Who is the mirror figure? The mother’s reflection or some other entity? I thought it would be fun to retell the story in the surface-obsessed eighties and give the mirror a more charismatic personality—that of a handsome 1980s movie star—to make the mirror more insidious and instrumental in creating the mother-daughter conflict. Movie/TV screens are, after all, another kind of mirror, a powerful vessel of projection that allows us to dream darkly.

Q. In Rouge, Belle is obsessed with 1980s Tom Cruise, while Noelle fixates on film stars from decades past. Can you say more about movie/TV screens as a different kind of mirror for society and ourselves? What do you see as the interplay between mirrors and screens?

Both are ways (sometimes quite damaging ways) of seeing ourselves. They’re a means by which we project and desire and dream. Noelle uses movies to escape from reality, from her day job in the dress shop, and so movies become a way that Belle dreams and escapes, too. Movies are aspirational, especially the ones Belle and Noelle love: classics and Tom Cruise movies of the eighties. They offer a glimpse of another more beautiful world, of beautiful people living more beautifully than we ever could. And because they invite comparison, movies, like mirrors, invite envy. For Belle and Noelle, there’s a disparity between the life and the self they see and long for on a movie screen and what’s really reflected back at them in the mirror. I wanted to explore how movies (and the internet) are screens that, for better or worse, shape how we then see ourselves in the mirror. In Rouge they begin to blur: both become dangerous portals of projection and longing and envy.

Q. Thinking of Eyes Wide Shut, there are strong elements of horror in Rouge, too. How do you see horror working in this book?

A novel about the beauty industry is rich terrain for horror. When I was watching beauty videos, noting the euphemisms for whiteness and ageing, and researching facial treatments, it wasn’t long before I found myself in deeply gothic, frightening terrain: “brightening” procedures, vampire facials, LED masks that conjure slasher movies. Go down the rabbit hole of beauty and you get to self-hatred pretty quickly—from there it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to the abyss, which is exactly what happens to Belle. What I love about horror is that the object of fear is often an object of desire, something we’re drawn to even as we shudder. Belle is mesmerized by La Maison de Méduse, by the beautiful Rougeians, and by the figure in the mirror. But she’s also afraid, and she should be. Any book about beauty is also a book about death, about the wonder and fear of touching the abyss. Anytime I become too focused with the surface, I always wonder what darkness, what difficult truth or reality, I’m hiding from. Rouge is about our very human impulse to fixate on the surface so as to flee those darkest depths.

Q. Rouge is a dangerous beauty cult. Can you talk about the cultish elements of the beauty industry and how they inspired the Rouge cult and Belle’s attraction to them? I’m thinking of the more disturbing racial elements such as the “brightening.”

When I became obsessed with skincare videos, I wondered, why can’t I stop watching these? I was fascinated by how the pull of beauty (or its promise) can be magical: put this cream on your face and it’ll transform you, like a potion in a fairy tale. There is something wondrous, playful, and almost childlike about the whole aspirational enterprise of self-care, and I love a transformation story. But in all my novels, I’m interested in exploring the shadow side of those transformation narratives that we’re sold: in media, film, fairy tales. The shadow side of the beauty industry is that it feeds and reinforces these very narrow ideas about what beauty is: whiteness, youth, Western ideals. Anyone who doesn’t fit within those parameters is made to feel less-than and envious, often from a very young age. As a biracial woman, I’ve always felt both vulnerable to and suspicious of this messaging. So does Belle. I wrote Rouge because I wanted to explore beauty’s shadow side and its cost. How much of myself must I erase to attain the ultimate surface? At Rouge, race, difference, and heritage are erased through memory extraction and “brightening.” I also wrote Rouge because, like Belle, I’m a total sucker for beauty and the peddlers of its promise. I’m spellbound by beauty’s power and its privilege, its suggestion of immortality, even as I know how sinister and exploitative it can be.

Q. Katherine Heiny has said that you excel at describing “the imperfect nature of any love perfectly.” In Rouge, the complicated love between a mother and daughter is central. Why did you choose that relationship to explore in a novel about beauty and envy?

“Snow White” explores these very thorny ideas of envy and beauty through a mother-daughter relationship, and it makes sense: those relationships are so charged and complex, very formative for daughters. And, of course, we inherit our looks from our parents, our way of seeing ourselves. Belle’s fixation with her skin comes from Noelle’s fixation. Being biracial and born of a white mother, she both learns about her difference and inherits her mother’s destructive relationship with the mirror. But as barbed as their relationship is, there’s also love there. Noelle hides the mirror in a closet and turns it toward the wall: she tries, in her way, to protect Belle from her own demons and damage. And much as Belle feels envy and anger toward her mother, she also loves her, is spellbound by her, and she protects her, too.

Q. NPR’s Lynn Neary described you as having a “keen sense of black humor.” Humor is embedded in your books, in caustic, sly, fiercely witty ways. As Laura van den Berg stated, you have a gift “for finding bright sparks of humor in the deepest dark.” Why does humor play a core role in your work?

I think satire can be a way to have fun with the things that have immense power over us. I’ve always been inspired by moments of profound powerlessness in the everyday: outsiderness in Bunny, toxic body image culture in 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, dealing with dismissive doctors in All’s Well. Rouge definitely has some darkly satirical moments with skincare, consumerism, the whole exploitative cult of beauty. Approaching these with humor takes some of that power back. I think it’s hilarious that Rouge is clearly a dangerous cult from the beginning but Belle doesn’t see it because she doesn’t want to. She’s that powerless, that vulnerable in the face of beauty and its promise. She’s been made to be, after all, all her life. As frightening as that is, it’s also deeply funny and human to be drawn to the things that destroy us.

Q. Your novels all have themes of alienation and loneliness and feature characters who are outsiders, trying to shape themselves into someone that is desired by people or groups they long to be a part of. Yet how does being obsessed with the surface serve to isolate them?

All obsessions isolate us in some ways. In my novels, I’m fascinated by the kind of loneliness that can emerge from secret fixation. In 13 Ways, Lizzie’s obsession with her body and diet estranges her socially. In All’s Well, Miranda’s chronic pain keeps everyone at a distance. In Rouge, Belle’s skincare regimen is an all-consuming secret that isolates her and doesn’t allow her to have relationships. But she’s obsessed because of a past secret trauma that goes deep beneath the skin: a violent conflict between herself, her mother, and the mirror when she was a child. Though she’s buried it, it still keeps her arrested and it holds her behind glass. I’m interested in occupying the kind of isolated consciousness that can’t connect because I think, even in an age of social media, where we’re encouraged to share images of ourselves broadly, we’re all getting lonelier, more physically isolated, consumed by envy at the curated glimpses we get of each other’s lives. The more we look at our screens instead of each other, the harder it is for us to really connect in a meaningful way. Rougemakes a horror novel of that reality.

Q. Can you talk a little about the importance of California as a setting in Rouge?

California felt very important as a setting for Rouge for a few reasons. The characters are obsessed with the movies. It’s also about a beauty cult and California is infamously cult-y: it conjures that magical promise of beauty, transformation, and immortality on the one hand, as well as violence and completely losing yourself on the other. Noelle, who is from Montreal, dreams of moving to California to become an actress, so California is aspirational for her. Because of the setting, I also felt I could have fun with noir elements in the novel: the detective Hud Hudson, who’s both investigating and vulnerable to the cult; the gothic and the occult undercurrents of Rouge; even the back-and-forth dialogue between Belle and Hud were inspired by old noir films. La Jolla, where Noelle lives and where most of the book takes place, is also right on the coast, and the ocean is very important in Rouge too. The ocean is after all the first and most elemental mirror there is. What better place to set a novel about people obsessed with the surface than on the coast of Southern California, on the beautiful edge of the literal abyss?