The Blog

Reading a novel written by someone you know can be daunting. Reviewing it can be even worse. What if you don’t like it? In the case of Permanent Makeup, such fears were never a problem. This novel delivers on every level. The characters are distinctive, and the plot kept me turning pages all the way to the end.

Written by Terra Ziporyn, one of my fellow contributors to Late Last Night Books, Permanent Makeup is the story of three generations of women—Maxine, her daughter Dodie, and Dodie’s daughter Margaret. Maxine, or Zeenie as she’s called, operates a skin care salon where her specialty is a form of tattooing she calls “permanent makeup.” The process involves depositing ink beneath the outer layer of skin so that a woman’s lips are permanently red, her eyes permanently lined. Zeenie is also good at “needling” scars until they are no longer visible. “It’s just a pity that the dermatologists are all so sold on that horrid laser business these days. So costly and so ineffective,” she says.

Dodie is a social worker at Safe Port shelter for abused women in Annapolis, Maryland. One of the shelter clients, a woman named Shelley, is the abused girlfriend of a well-respected Maryland legislator. When the legislator discovers where Shelley is hiding, Dodie realizes that with his connections in the state, he’ll find her wherever she goes, so she devises a plan to hide Shelley, temporarily at least, in Zeenie’s salon. Selling Zeenie on the idea is not easy, but the direness of Shelley’s situation stirs Zeenie’s compassion and her professional zeal to transform Shelley into a woman no one, including her legislator boyfriend, will recognize. Also, Zeenie needs a receptionist for the salon, a job Shelley is willing to take on for the year and a half Zeenie says she’ll need to complete the transformation.

The plan seems perfect, but not for Dodie. Her supervisor at Safe Port rules the idea a flagrant violation of shelter rules, forcing Dodie to lie about her continued involvement in the scheme, creating a breach of trust between the two and increasing self-disgust for Dodie. Also, the legislator accosts Dodie at her car one night and threatens her if she doesn’t lead him to Shelley. Later, she finds him in her home chatting with teenaged Margaret. While she’s trying to sort out these traumas, her husband leaves her.

Zeenie has her own troubles with a boyfriend suffering from severe depression, and as we learn in skillfully developed flashbacks, her life has been no picnic. Years earlier she immigrated to the United States from South Africa, mainly because of a soured adulterous relationship with the doctor who taught her about micropigmentation, or permanent makeup. And also because Dodie, in a fit of independence and rebellion, had fled to the United States before that.

The ever evolving relationship between Zeenie and Dodie is the focus of the novel. Both women are very thoughtful about the mother-daughter connection. Zeenie remembers, “Every time she had held little Dodie on her lap, combed her hair . . . , or simply gazed on the girl at play, she felt a cord between them. She understood that this cord would never yield, no matter how Dodie grew, whoever she turned out to be, and however they temporally felt about each other.”

Dodie “had hoped her that her relationship with Margaret would have been closer, she had always tried to convey her openness and acceptance of inadequacies and exude non-judgmentalism and unconditional respect—all deficits in Maxine’s relationship to her teenage self that still rankled her—but Margaret had progressively become colder and more withdrawn.”

In addition to family relationships, the novel’s focus includes surrogate daughters; Zeenie’s relationship with Shelley becomes just that. To submit to Zeenie’s plan to transform her appearance, Shelley has to learn to trust Zeenie, a process that takes time.

Throughout the novel, the characters offer thoughtful reflections on experiences in their lives. One of my favorites is Zeenie’s musings on time: “That morning, though, she understood that the moments we call the past, present, and future coexist, so that everything that had ever happened or would ever happen was always present, and of equal consequence. For that reason, she supposed, it didn’t matter that you died; it mattered that you lived.”

My only disappointment with Permanent Makeup was that the relationship between Dodie and Margaret was not as developed as it could have been. Ziporyn frames the novel as an email from Zeenie and Dodie to Margaret when she leaves home to live with her father. They hope to show her that she is not all that different from the people they were at age seventeen. Developing Margaret more and her relationship with her mother would make that frame more effective. But maybe Ziporyn is saving that for a sequel.