You're Not Pretty Enough

By Jennifer Tress

You’re Not Pretty Enough is like Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened meets Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar. From the “Sex Papers” Jen drew as a four-year-old when her mom was pregnant with her younger sister, to her sole teenage act of rebellion: going to church. “We’re very disappointed in you,” her nonreligious parents said. When she was sixteen Jennifer fell in love with Jon Bon Jovi and felt certain that if he just met her, he’d feel exactly the same way. They met all right. But that’s not what happened.

At twenty-three Jen married her college sweetheart and divorced him at twenty-six after he’d had an affair. Affairs happen every day. What doesn’t happen every day? The wife and the girlfriend meeting at a bar, discovering they liked each other, and then confronting Jen’s husband that same night.

The true stories contained here - the title refers to something her ex-husband said to her- are smart, uproarious and utterly relatable. Told chronologically and chock full of truths, You’re Not Pretty Enough provides an example of how to be comfortable in your own skin and ultimately live a full life (even if you screw up, royally, along the way).

Praise for You’re Not Pretty Enough

An unvarnished look at the highs and lows of growing up and growing into ourselves. Soul-baring, brave, and genuinely hilarious, Jennifer Tress is that best friend we all want to have in our corner. Cathy Alter, author of Up for Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over

Jennifer Tress is a funny bunny with loads of tales to spin for your reading pleasure. Buy her book and enjoy the ride. Sara Benincasa, author Agorafabulous

Smart, hilarious, beautiful, and from Cleveland?! Bon Jovi really blew it when he let Jennifer Tress just walk out of his life like that. Lucky for you, dear reader, you can learn from Jon’s mistakes and welcome Jennifer into your life with open arms courtesy of her excellent new book, which will have you laughing, crying, and ready to beat the crap out of Jon Bon Jovi if he ever breaks her heart again! In fact, if you get the chance, I say you take a couple swings at him anyway. For Jennifer. Dave Hill, performer, Clevelander, author Tasteful Nudes

Tress’ writing sings on the page, giving the reader the sense that you’re sharing stories with your best friends at a sleepover. From teenage-feuled lust for Bon Jovi to the particularly cruel comments given to her from a former love, Tress will have you laughing and cringing in solidarity. Kambri Crews, author, Burn Down the Ground

Jennifer Tress is ebullient and hilarious and fearless. Read this book. Mandy Stadtmiller, deputy editor of xoJane

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jennifer Tress
• Release date: Jul 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989481724

Jennifer Tress

Jennifer is a writer and storyteller based in Washington, DC., where she lives with her husband.

Book preview

You’re Not Pretty Enough

Extraordinary stories from an (un) ordinary life.

By Jennifer Tress

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Jennifer Tress

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

Table of Contents

AUTHOR’S NOTE

INTRODUCTION

SEX EDUCATION

CONTRA DANCING AND THE ART OF TEENAGE REBELLION

HOW TO BE RESPONSIBLE

INSECTS AND OTHER SUCH SNACKS

SHOT THROUGH THE HEART

COME TOGETHER, RIGHT NOW, OVER WEED

PATH OF MOST RESISTANCE

YOU’RE NOT PRETTY ENOUGH

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

HOW TO BE AN ASSHOLE

HOW NOT TO BE AN ASSHOLE

ROAD TRIP

EPILOGUE: SEPARATION TO SAVE THE MARRIAGE

AFTERWORD: YOU’RE NOT PRETTY ENOUGH, THE MOVEMENT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

END NOTES

For my family.

Author’s Note

All of the stories contained here are true and based on my memories, as well as the memories of others who were associated with the events. To move the story along, sometimes I truncated timelines or consolidated characters. Some names were also changed.

Introduction

This is a book about defining moments. We all have them, or a series of them, that when added up give us insight into who we are and why we do things. Come along as I tell you mine…

SEX EDUCATION

When my mom was pregnant with my younger sister, I asked her where babies came from. Being a feminist and a bohemian, she felt obligated to be completely honest. She pulled out a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves—the women’s health Bible of that time—and showed me diagrams of reproductive organs and procedures while she narrated.

When a man’s penis becomes aroused, he enters it into a woman’s vagina. Once there, sperm is released and travels to the woman’s womb. See, this is the womb. An egg is deposited—all women have eggs…

We have eggs?!

…If all goes well the sperm from the penis fertilizes the egg, which develops into a baby. She looked down to see me staring at the pictures, riveted.

Well, she continued, "I guess when a man is aroused he doesn’t always enter a woman’s vagina, but let’s save that story, shall we?"

Yes, let’s. Because I was four.

My mother says that immediately after this conversation I marched up to my room and emerged two hours later with a collection of pieces that my family now refers to as The Sex Papers. These works of art are sweet, but subversive. Some of them are titled with the word SEX just in case the viewer wasn’t sure what the scene was depicting.

Here are two naked people sitting across from each other smiling and smoking cigarettes (note the breasts directly under the chin). I think all the sex scenes in seventies soap operas inspired this—how everyone used to smoke after doing it?

Here's a cheerleader, cheering for sex. Gooooooo SEX! What does the H stand for though? Happy? Horny? Handjobs? Regardless, I obviously felt positively toward it. Sex had to be a good thing if people were cheering about it, right?

And who’s this comely lady with the strange arms and fashion sense? I’m sure this was my interpretation of 70s fashion, but I don’t remember seeing any dresses with holes cut out so that women could properly display their impossibly perky breasts.

This lady is about to have sex with a guy in a beanie and polka-dot pajamas. She appears to be wearing kneepads, which perhaps shows a penchant for rough sex? Maybe that’s why the word SEX is crossed out?

The most technical of all the Sex Papers, most likely influenced by all those damn diagrams.

Which gave way to the actual baby-making process. This is how hot pink people make a baby.

Music played constantly in my home: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Elton John; the Beatles; Stones; Michael Jackson; Donna Summer; and…Marlo Thomas. Yes, I was raised to believe in a land where the horses run free, a land where you and me were free to be, well…you and me. So while clearly SEX took precedence as the overriding theme of the Sex Papers, there were other messages that seeped in. Messages about love, about family, and about being a strong woman. The series concludes with:

You got to love yourself before you love your baby and your husBENT and when you grow up you get married to your boyfriend or a boy that you love but the important THINE to do is love the whole family. TRUTH.

I quickly moved from my drawing phase to playacting and cast my toys and Star Wars action figures in an ongoing production called Mash Your Privates. This involved me holding two figures—one in each hand—and making them face each other while clacking their plastic torsos together in a savant-like fashion.

These are the pairings that made sense to me: Leia and Luke, Storm Trooper and Storm Trooper, Obi Wan and Yoda, C3PO and R2D2, Han Solo and Chewbacca and Weeble Wobble and Barbie. Thinking back on this, she must have had a fetish for little people and a goal: but no matter how hard she tried, that Weeble Wobble would. just. not. fall. down. Poor Barbie. Always a bottom.

A path my mom didn’t foresee during the Mash Your Privates years was plastic doll incest. One day I was mashing the privates of my Donnie and Marie Osmond dolls, and my Mom walked past this scene with a basket full of laundry, and yelled, For God’s sake, Jenny, they’re brother and sister! Then she muttered something incomprehensively and carried the basket upstairs. I paused for a minute—while Je T’Aime by Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg played in the background—and looked at their frozen, innocent, smiling faces and their matching pink, purple, and tan outfits. Well, so are Luke and Leia, I reasoned, and went back to the mashing.

Of course, none of this had any connection whatsoever with the euphoria that comes from feeling turned on. I didn’t know what that was until I saw my first Prince video: Little Red Corvette. I watched rapt as he batted his Bambi-like eyes and subtly gyrated with the microphone stand, looked right into the camera, and then, my soul. I didn’t quite get what this feeling was, but I definitely thought a lot about that tiny androgynous sexpot at night while I wrestled with the sheets.

These wrestling matches started on a random night when I was around thirteen. While I was tossing and turning, the sheet glided between my legs in a very pleasant way and I froze. What the hell was that? I thought and proceeded to perform the move fifty-eight more times. So there I was night after night dry humping my bedding.

When Purple Rain was released, I went with two friends to the movie theater. We told our parents we were going to see Gremlins and bought tickets to that show but snuck into the back of an already darkened theater showing Purple Rain. We were not prepared. We gripped our armrests tightly, mouths hanging open as we watched Prince finger-fuck Apollonia and the stars interpret various songs like Sex Shooter, and Darling Nikki. It was way too much for our porous minds. What was I thinking jumping from dolls bumping plastic uglies straight to Prince and the Revolution in one move? One should complete that progression in five moves! Minimum! I went home that night completely confused and freaked out yet also excited to hit the sheets.

Jenny, are you OK? my mom asked. You don’t look so good.

No, fine, just tired. I’m going up to bed.

"How was Gremlins?"

I looked directly at her. Some parts were really, really weird.

That night, amid the sheets, I thought about the scene with Prince and Apollonia. Instead of stopping when I reached that point of near unbearable pleasure—it felt like being tickled—I kept going. Did I pee? I wondered and felt the sheets, but nothing was overly wet. For a while, I kept it my own little secret. And took lots of naps.

My friends and I didn’t talk about stuff like that when we were thirteen. And I didn’t talk about my own feelings until I knew what they meant. I think we realized we knew next to nothing about grown-up issues and that we were in that odd, short phase between leaving childhood behind and committing to being teens. We were scared to admit to or share anything that made us look like the weird kid. Unless we knew we weren’t alone. I always had respect for the kids who were the first to admit they were cutters or who had bad home lives; you could almost physically see a wave of relief wash over the people who were present for a confession and for an opening to say, I had no idea. Me too.

This is also the stage in life when most of us had to attend health class, that awful period where you sat through uncomfortable lectures—or in my class, overhead projector diagrams. My junior high health teacher tried to make these lectures fun by doing things like drawing his own overhead slides to guide a particular topic. One that stands out as the most embarrassing was the slide he used to explain the ovulation process by drawing an airplane with an egg jumping out of it yelling, Ovulaaatttioooon! as it pulled its parachute ripcord. He did this leisurely while he stood at the front of the class in his white polo shirt and tight, navy blue polyester shorts and raised his hand to simulate the slow, swaying back-and-forth of an object gliding safely to the ground. All he got for his trouble was the sound of silence. Really. You could hear the crickets.

At fourteen my breasts grew from As to bountiful Cs seemingly overnight, which amused my younger sister. Whenever I was being bossy, she retorted by sticking her fists under her T-shirt and stretching the material out to make them look like huge, lopsided breasts and saying, Whatever! in the brattiest tone possible. At first I’d lunge, ready to throttle her, but that only seemed to egg her on, so I soon turned the tables. These puppies? I’d say, pointing to my chest. They’re comin’ for you too. And they did.

This transformation of my chest brought attention mainly from skeevy old men. It later brought on the epiphany that many men are rendered powerless in the presence of big boobs, but at fourteen it only made me uncomfortable, and I tried to hide them under numerous Limited Forenza Shaker Knit sweaters that I color coordinated with my stirrup pants. Sometimes male teachers would call me and other well-endowed girls up to their desks and ask things like, So, how was your weekend? while they stretched back in their chairs, arms behind their heads, spreading their legs apart.

Health class ended the same year we completed junior high, and our teacher decided to close out the course with a talent show. It might have made more sense to put on a show with acts relevant to things we learned, like short plays inspired by Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach, but instead it was just a run-of-the-mill talent show. Still in my Prince phase, a friend and I decided we should pair up and do an interpretive dance to When Doves Cry. We practiced for hours in her screened-in porch, choreographing every last move and settling on show-day outfits of royal blue satin shorts that went down to our mid-thighs, white tank tops, and overly permed hair with lace bows and lots of makeup. We looked like clown boxers.

As we clumsily performed the routine and routinely elbowed each other accidently, our health teacher went from watching us intently to cheering us on for our creativity and heart. I don’t remember anyone winning, but upon recalling this with a couple friends from high school recently, I could see one of the girls dusting off the cobwebs in her mind and shouting, "Oh my God, I SAW that show." She didn’t sound pleased.

At sixteen I started working at a local video store. In the mideighties, Blockbusters had sprung up nearly everywhere, but small towns like mine didn’t warrant such an investment. Instead, I worked at a store called Stop N’ Go Video, which was about seven hundred square feet and located in a strip mall. After I got the initial and brief training, I worked my shifts alone and was responsible for closing out the cash register and securing the store. Often, my friends would visit, and we’d watch movies that were PG enough to withstand any potential customer’s taste meter. Booooorrrring.

At least, that was until we discovered a system for the porn. We didn’t have enough space for a back room to store the X-rated box covers, so Stop N’ Go’s solution was to create a binder with either the video boxes flattened in the laminate sleeves or the promotional fliers from the distribution companies. Patrons would have to come to the front counter and ask for the binder to flip through and make their selection, which was located under the cash register.

This created countless embarrassing situations where