LRN No.49: face blindness

Plus: giant hero rats to the rescue

I have been thinking about faces a lot - partly because I had the attractiveness of my own face repeatedly assessed, entirely unbidden, by viral orthodontist, incel hero and father of mewing Dr Mike Mew when I spent a day with him for Guardian Saturday.

(I am “middle of the road”, he told me, I “look suboptimal”, my face is “deficient” and “dull”. At one point, he asked me to tell him whether I was better looking than my sister. It made my jaw drop - a big no-no, if you’re into mewing, the postural technique to broaden your jaw that demands you keep your tongue firmly lodged in your palate.)

But I had been thinking of faces long before I had ever heard of Mike Mew. I’ve been thinking about how journalists don’t really describe faces anymore.

Picture: Murray Ballard/The Guardian

I learned to be a reporter from making television documentaries, and I still approach stories in the same, visual way - thinking in terms of scenes, the images I’m evoking for my readers, the encounter with my subjects that I can conjure in readers’ minds.

In my first book, Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, there were loads of descriptions of what people looked like. I noted how their hair was styled, the shape of any beard, what tattoos they had, what clothes and jewelry they had chosen to wear the day they met me. All those things, I thought, evoked character. By describing them, I was showing my reader what the person speaking to me was like.

That book came out in 2020, a year when so much changed. In they years that followed, there have been scandals that have caused many writers - and editors - to pause before they sketch out what someone looks like in a few sentences.

Kate Clanchy’s Orwell Prize-winning memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, fell from grace after readers noticed that she had commented on racialised features of her students’ faces, among other things. It cost her her reputation, and, ultimately, her book, after her publisher, Picador (my publisher) parted ways with her in the wake of the scandal. (If you’re new to this story, this is a good place to start.)

Clanchy went further than most of us would ever want to go when she described what the children in her memoir looked like; she wrote of “chocolate skin”, “almond eyes” and “Ashkenazi noses”. By focusing on immutable characteristics, she was arguably doing more than evoking character. But the backlash she faced was harsh, and it’s impact was brutal. It was a moment of reckoning for the entire publishing industry. To describe became to objectify, to pigeonhole, to judge.

Now, I sketch out my interviewees by describing their manner - their hand gestures, how expressions erupt across their face, how they move. I might describe someone’s facial features if it’s relevant to the story - how much a sister resembles the photos on the wall of her murdered brother, for example, or Mew’s sinuous lantern jaw - but otherwise I leave it blank.

I can’t help wondering whether something has been lost. Can my readers see my interviewees in their minds? Or have we moved on to a more evolved era? Instead of telling readers exactly what to see, is it better to leave it to their imagination?

Things that have caught my eyes and ears:

• I presented Pick of the Week on Radio 4 last Sunday, so I spent a week listening to lots of remarkable things…

• …pick of my picks is probably The Animal Employment Agency, which includes details about how giant rats are being trained to rescue people after natural disasters. As if being trapped under rubble wasn’t traumatic enough…

• … and also this touching episode of Meet David Sedaris. How am I only just discovering him now?

• am deeply immersed in Half-Life, Joe Dunthorne’s shocking, funny, deftly-told account of the disturbing truth he uncovered when he sought to explore his family history in Nazi Germany

• geeked out at the genius that is John Burn-Murdoch, the FT’s Chief Data Reporter, in this free seminar he’s been giving about how to tell stories with graphs. Final session is on Wednesday.