My mother was pretty, like movie-star pretty. She was blond and had an hourglass figure. She was 20 years younger than my father and clearly his showpiece. I think if she had just sat beaming on a couch, never uttering a word, it would have made my father perfectly happy.

I remember watching my mother at her vanity brushing her long blond fine hair that would fly off in the late sunlight like gossamer. Then she would carefully and expertly wrap those delicate yellow strands with pins, holding and moulding them into the perfect French twist. I remember seeing myself reflected in that same mirror right behind her and thinking, “She is blond and perfect. She has entree into a world I will never know. I am dark and have moles on my face. My hair is straight and pointless. I already look sad.”

I remember when she cut off her hair my father stopped talking to her for weeks – as if she had cut his hair, because to all intents and purposes she was his property. I remember thinking right then: fuck beauty. Fuck pleasing men. No one will ever own my fucking body. Fuck fuck fuck. I stopped shaving my underarms and legs. I refused to wear a bra. I wore overalls and Frye boots and purple suede and leather headbands. I had a lot of sex. I almost drank myself to death.

In my 40s (I’m 71 now) I became obsessed about having a not-flat stomach. My obsession took me around the world where I talked to women about what it means to be beautiful. I was researching a play called The Good Body that went to Broadway in 2004. I met a married lady in her 60s from Beverly Hills who tightened her vagina as an anniversary gift to her husband. I met a woman who had 26 plastic surgeries on most of her body because she believed if she kept going she would one day be perfect and someone would surely love her. I met an astounding woman in a field under a marula tree in the Rift Valley in Kenya. I asked her if she was obsessed with being beautiful or thin. She pointed to the tree. She said, “Do you say this tree is more beautiful than that tree? Or this tree” – she pointed to another – “is more beautiful than this tree?” You’re a tree. I’m a tree. You have to love your tree, she said. Eve. Love your tree.

I desperately tried. I even started a short-lived Love Your Tree movement. Then I got stage 3/4 uterine cancer and almost died. I lost seven organs and 70 nodes and 30 pounds. I stood naked in front of the mirror. It was not a vanity. I was bald. I had a huge thick scar down my entire torso like a tattoo of a snake or a river. My skin was flushed from chemo. My lips were reddish, the way they get when you have a fever. My eyes were sparkling, wild from the steroids. I looked like I’d been though something. Something huge. I looked like I’d travelled somewhere, gone to the other side. I looked fucking beautiful.