An electrifying, propulsive novel about the rise and fall of a controversial beauty mogul and the moral gray areas at the intersections of beauty, power, and ambition It’s 2015 and Maxine Thomas, the founder and creative director of the cult makeup company Reveal, has just been suspended by her own Board for a scandalous transgression. Housebound in her New York City apartment, where she awaits the verdict on her future, Max recounts her version of the events that have brought her to this moment. From her start as a precocious suburban child in the eighties to her decades as a workaholic visionary, Max proselytizes a sheer, dewy look--cosmetics through a female gaze--all while battling sexist investors, the whiplash of cultural change, and the mounting pressure to keep her sexuality a secret. But when Max’s story catches up to her present, she must contend with the cost of true transparency. Told over nine intense days yet spanning a lifetime, <Sheer< is a gripping, incisive, and provocative tale of a complicated female vanguard’s insatiable drive and the slippery ground between empowerment and abuse of power.

Autorentext
Vanessa Lawrence is a writer, editor, and native New Yorker. Her debut novel, Ellipses, was named a best book of 2024 by Vogue and a most anticipated book of the year by ELLE, Electric Literature, and Autostraddle. For nearly two decades she covered the arts, fashion, beauty, design, and New York society as a staff writer for publications including Women’s Wear Daily and W Magazine. She has a BA in history from Yale University and an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

Klappentext

**Told over nine charged days, Sheer is the gripping tale of a controversial beauty mogul’s insatiable ambition and the slippery ground between empowerment and abuse of power.

**It’s 2015 and Maxine Thomas, the founder and creative director of the cult makeup company Reveal, has just been suspended by her own Board for a scandalous transgression. Housebound in her New York City apartment, where she awaits the verdict on her future, Max recounts her version of the events that have brought her to this moment.

From her start as a precocious suburban child in the eighties to her decades as a workaholic visionary, Max proselytizes a sheer, dewy look—cosmetics through a female gaze—all while battling sexist investors, the whiplash of cultural change, and the mounting pressure to keep her sexuality a secret. But when Max’s story catches up to her present, she must contend with the cost of true transparency. Who has she become in her relentless pursuit of success? And what will happen if she loses it all?

Leseprobe
DAY ONE

Morning

Bliss isn't a first-class ticket to Bora Bora. It isn't a prime-time table at the hottest restaurant in town. It isn't a lightning-fast metabolism that allows a young woman to eat like an Olympic swimmer and still fit into her size twenty-five jeans. Grade-A Mongolian cashmere, custom-tailored shirts, jars of face cream boasting ingredients the FDA will never approve: Bliss is none of those things. It's the amnesia that coats your vision like Vaseline when you first open your eyes to the morning light before you remember the nightmare your life has become. Before you feel the weight of the world's disdain.

I wake at 5 a.m. like it is any other day. The bedroom is dark and cool. The sheets are silky against my skin. Habit propels me out of bed and into the bathroom to begin my morning toilette. It isn't until I am standing in the middle of that white marble room, one leg partially covered in the black spandex of my running leggings, that I realize I have nowhere to go. There are no meetings to attend, no company to oversee, and therefore no need to run before dawn breaks through the darkness outside. I have no reason to be.

Down go the leggings. On go my pajamas. Back to bed I trudge. After years of 5 a.m. starts, my body refuses to rest. It is off to the kitchen, then, to brew some coffee. I sit with a searing mug, dark as a void, at my dining room table, soft light glinting off its polished surface, a blank document on my laptop screen. I am ready to type away. Stab away is more like it.

Before I disabled the search engine alert for my name, my phone hammered notifications at me like a firing squad. It is so interesting that The New York Times has no problem printing the word bitch but draws the line at fuck. That fifth letter makes all the difference.

This is the kind of thing that gets my blood burning. It's good no one's around because I'd scald them with my touch. Everyone on the internet thinks they know what happened. So does the Board. Only I know the truth. The Bible tells us that the truth shall set us free. If the Bible were written today that line would require serious revision.

I need to write my story, the one the Board will never hear and that the public will never know. Even my lawyer, Sandrine, will never grasp the full extent of it. Sandrine is my defense attorney, which suggests that I require defending. I guess I do in the most literal sense. But defensiveness implies wrongdoing and I am here because of someone else's wrongdoing. Two someone elses, in fact.

Ellen and Amanda. Two women who fucked me over. Thanks to them, I am hunkered down in my apartment, seething until the Board decides whether they will sever me from my beloved Reveal, the company I built from scratch.

Obviously, I can't say this to the Board. It would sound too angry, too aggressive. People like their women leaders unemotional. I can compartmentalize as well as any man, though when I do, I'm accused of being an ice queen or a power-hungry witch. No matter what, I am an outsider. My whole life, all forty years of it, has been one long battle to manifest my intrinsic worth in a world that has told me that I have none.

I have never considered my existence in its totality. Autobiographical exercises have always struck me as deeply self-indulgent. In this moment, I recognize that they don't stem from ego; they grow from necessity. Other people have painted me as a monster. I need to show who I really am. As always, transparency will be my savior.

I cannot scream my story from the rooftops-no one can stop me from writing it down.

Origins

It all started when I was six years old. That may sound young, but I was always precocious. My mother was out grocery shopping and didn't want to bring me, so she left me home alone in our white clapboard house. I understand this is something mothers are no longer permitted to do, that today they would be reprimanded and even arrested for such a misdeed; in 1980, this was a very common occurrence. My mother didn't have regular childcare. While my parents would splurge on a babysitter for the occasional date night at a restaurant or movie theater, there was no budget for a day-to-day nanny.

My mother wasn't negligent. She informed our next-door neighbor that she would be gone for forty minutes. Left to my own devices, I grew bored of the television set and wandered out of the living room, up the stairs, down the second-floor hallway. Nubby gray carpeting covered the warped floorboards. Into my parents' bedroom I went.

This room was usually off limits to me, explicitly so. My parents were adamant about their need for privacy. I was ordered never to enter their room without a preliminary knock, regardless of whether the door was closed or ajar. Even once they called, "Come in" or waved me forward, I never ventured farther into the room than a few steps beyond the doorway.

The spiritual dead bolt on my parents' bedroom only made it more appealing. My mother's absence was an opportunity of which I took full advantage. The oatmeal wall-to-wall carpeting in their room was more luxurious than the floor c…