For nearly a year journalist Sara Sidner was on the ground in Minneapolis. She covered the murder of George Floyd, the subsequent uprisings, and the trial of Derek Chauvin, the now convicted officer responsible for Floyd’s death. For a time she was a welcome local.

“There isn’t a day that has gone by since George Floyd was murdered, and the video went viral, where I didn’t talk to someone from the Minneapolis community—the Floyd family, their attorneys—[or have] written about what happened here,” she said the day after the Chauvin verdict was announced.

Sider, a national and international correspondent for CNN, knows a thing or two about being on the front lines. She’s witnessed families mangled by war and terrorism firsthand and led CNN’s coverage in Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown was shot by a police officer in 2014.

There was also that time she was hit by a bullet shell while reporting outside of Muammar el-Qaddafi’s seized compound in 2011. “Rebel: Libya is free,” she tweeted from her BlackBerry.

Earlier than that she was there—in person—amid the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008. For the one-year anniversary, she recalled the experience for CNN:

“Outside there were a flurry of stunned reporters struggling with cables and notepads, cameras and phones trying to get the information back ASAP. We all stood in a row like sitting ducks. There were no barriers, no police tape, and nothing to stop anyone from getting too close.”

But it was the 2021 story of Juliana Jimenez Sesma, a Los Angeles woman who lost her mother and stepfather to COVID-19, that memorably brought Sidner to tears on live television in January. There were no stray bullet shells or bombs, no concrete buildings tumbling to the ground. Just a somber, socially distanced funeral in a parking lot under a pop-up canopy. For Sidner, and for numerous people around the world, this was another kind of front line.

Despite enduring those core-shaking experiences, there was something different about Minneapolis. In June, days after Floyd’s death, the city’s police chief, Medaria Arradondo, called the killing “a violation of humanity” outright. To see a chief almost immediately react against the blue-wall-of-silence culture that permeates the police force was a rare moment. For months Sidner was embedded in the community, which up until this April she referred to as her second home. Minneapolitans greeted her like she was one of their own, a kindness that helped take the edge off of a difficult day of reporting. 

“I just always felt so helpless, honestly,” she says. “Because nothing I could say or do could fix the heartbreak in the community, the heartbreak of the family, the heartbreak of the people who stood there and watched a man be murdered, you know?”

Fill in the blank: “The scene that made me the most nervous and excited was….”

The fight scene with Halston at the beach house. It was the first scene we shot after we got back from the COVID break. Everyone was wearing masks and shields and trying to navigate this new world. I had never been on a job that was interrupted and all of a sudden gets shut down for six months. So there was a lot of anticipation, and I definitely felt a bit scared. But at the same time, it was such an exciting scene to film. We had such a great set. It was the best memory and the scariest memory at the same time.

What helped you most get into character?

I wore a wig. And in the later years, we did some tricks with the makeup. My eyebrows change a lot and got skinnier. I didn’t have any prosthetics, just makeup.

What was your favorite costume to wear?

I love that I got to wear this Tiffany mesh silver bra under a very cool suit that costume designer Jeriana San Juan had custom-made. That’s one of the ones I would have taken home! And I got to wear multiple original Halston looks, which was really nice. I got to wear an original Ultrasuede coat.

What makeup and skin-care products did you rely on while filming?

We were always doing a frosty look on the eyes for Elsa. But on my own, there are a few different products I love, including Vintner’s Daughter. I use their essence and their serum. And my dermatologist, Dr. Macrene Alexiades, has a really great serum that I’ve been using called Macrene actives. And I love Dr. Barbara Sturm’s foaming cleanser.

If there was a superlative for you on set, it would be:

Most talkative. [Laughs.] Maybe.

What was the most rewarding part of the entire experience?

The friendships that came out of it, specifically with [director] Dan Minahan, the cast, and the producers. That was definitely the most rewarding.

Fill in the blank: “My choice of beverage and snack on set is….”

This chocolate called Honey Mama, a vegan, all-natural chocolate. It’s the best thing in the world. I can eat most of it in a day, no problem. It’s cacao and honey and pretty much nothing else. And I drink hot tea with lemon and honey. Every production assistant now knows that!

What’s next for you?

I’m focusing on writing, because I developed a feature I’m hoping to get off the ground soon. And I produced a documentary about birth in America that we are trying to find a home for. I got interested in the topic when I saw a documentary called The Business of Being Born, about how childbirth is approached in the United States, because it’s the only country in the developed world where mortality rates are rising. We also started a nonprofit called Mother Lovers to raise awareness. Women’s rights and health care are very important to me.

Finally, when you’re not working, what’s your idea of a perfect day?

Definitely seeing friends, going for a nice, long lunch, and watching a movie. 

Jessica Radloff is the West Coast editor at Glamour. You can follow her on Instagram at @jessicaradloff14. 

When Taylor Henry was five years old, she knew her mom had a sparkly crown. And when she went grocery shopping with her mother, she would overhear people say things like, “Oh, my gosh, it’s Heather!” Taylor concluded that she must be the daughter of a Disney princess. When she asked if that was true, Taylor’s mother—Heather French Henry, Miss America 2000—replied, “Close, but no.”

Taylor, now 17, laughs at her younger self. She still loves Disney and her mom, but she has a different understanding of what that crown means. “My mom was Miss America,” she says. “But what matters is that she’s a hard-working individual who works with our nation’s veterans.”

I can relate to Taylor, as I’m also the daughter of a Miss America. My mom is Pam Eldred, Miss America 1970, who represented my home state of Michigan when she won the title. I never likened my mom to a Disney princess, but I definitely knew her crowns were important—they occupied an entire row of a bookshelf in my childhood home—and that the grocery store was a fraught space. Mom was careful never to go shopping “without her face on” because so many people would recognize her.

Despite the public’s perception of pageants, winning the Miss America crown remains a unique achievement. Since the first winner was named in 1921, only 93 women have had the title. But the Miss America daughters club is even more exclusive, as just over half of the winners have had daughters.

I’ve often wondered if my experience growing up as the daughter of a Miss America was unique, so I reached out to two dozen other daughters of past winners. Some of them are tweens, while others are in their late 60s. We’re spread out geographically, and we’ve chosen a variety of career paths, from athlete and attorney to Broadway performer, journalist, teacher, and mom ourselves.

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The meaning of being a member of the Miss America daughters club has changed over the decades as the cultural power of the pageant itself has waned. But it wasn’t always that way. Carol Koplan’s mother, Rosemary LaPlanche, was Miss America 1941. 

The earliest Miss America daughter with whom I spoke, Carol grew up in California where her mother had a movie studio contract and her father produced and directed television shows (her mom was Miss Studio City before becoming Miss California). 

According to Carol, “Well, [being Miss America] was different then because there was only one major pageant—they didn’t have Miss Universe at that time, and all the other pageants…. [Mom] was a celebrity, on the war bond tour, and in all the soldiers’ lockers.”

Carol’s experience contrasts with that of Lynlee Bell, who at 11 years old is the youngest Miss America daughter with whom I spoke. Her mom is Debbye Turner Bell, 1990’s winner, and only the second Black woman to win the title. When Lynlee’s friends at school found out her mom had been Miss America, they asked, “What’s that?” “Nobody really had any interest or knew what [Miss America] was,” she says

While public interest in Miss America has declined over time, the sense of camaraderie within generations of its daughters remains strong. Stacy Sempier is the daughter of Evelyn Ay Sempier, Miss America 1954. She believes that there’s “an immediate connection between Miss America daughters because we have had people ask us the same questions, about the year our moms won, if we still have the crown, what her talent was. I think that’s a lovely legacy of shared experience on our part as daughters.” 

Stacy’s godmother is Lee Meriwether, Miss America 1955, and she grew up thinking of Meriwether’s daughter, Lesley Aletter, as her godsister.

Ava Johnson, 15, whose mom is Nicole Johnson (Miss America 1999), and Victoria Ebner, 12, whose mom is Katie Harman Ebner (Miss America 2002), have forged a friendship despite living on different coasts of the country. In 2016 they met up at Disneyland when Nicole Johnson was speaking in California at a PADRE Foundation event. (PADRE stands for Pediatrics-Adolescent Diabetes Research Education; when she was Miss America, Johnson’s platform issue was diabetes awareness, as she lives with type 1 diabetes and competed while wearing an insulin pump.) Ava and Victoria have maintained their relationship via text. 

The first fellow member of the Miss America daughters club I ever met was Vandy Scoates. Vandy’s mom is Miss America 1965, Vonda Kay Van Dyke. Vandy and I connected when our moms took us to the 70^th anniversary of the Miss America Pageant. We were both only children of former winners, and I remember feeling an immediate kinship with Vandy. We were just a year apart in age so it was easy to hang out as our moms signed autographs and took pictures with fans. 

Melissa Verdecia always knew she wanted a baby, but as a dancer with Ballet Hispanico, she also knew getting pregnant would mean significant time off from a career that depends entirely on her body. It was easy to postpone—after the next tour, she told herself, or when she got a coveted role.

Then in March 2020, Ballet Hispanico stopped all in-person operations when New York City entered its COVID-19 lockdown. Verdecia and her husband—Ballet Hispanico dancer Lyvan Verdecia—were laid off along with the rest of the company’s dancers. It was a full-blown crisis—with one unexpected upside. Their schedules were wide open. 

“Although financially it wasn’t as optimal, we had the time,” Melissa Verdecia recalls. “One day I said, “Lyvan, maybe this is the time.” Nine months later their son Liam was born, a month earlier than expected.

“Nowadays I have the privilege of being a stay-at-home mom, and to nurse on demand,” Verdecia says. “If we were with the company, Monday through Friday, sometimes Saturday, we dance 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. We would tour, and it’s exhausting.” COVID-19 has allowed Verdecia to be the mother she had longed to be—something her ballet career had, until now, put on hold.

Outside of the ballet world, the pandemic is shaping up to mean a huge drop in births in the U.S. and other countries. But in the universe of dance, a COVID-induced baby boom is underway. In January, New York City Ballet dancer Megan Fairchild revealed she was pregnant with twins. That same week, American Ballet Theater’s Lauren Post announced she was expecting her second child and NYCB’s Teresa Reichlen shared news of the birth of her first. Pacific Northwest Ballet had two dancers give birth within a few months—Leah Merchant and Laura Tisserand. Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Ingrid Silva had a daughter in November, and Miami City Ballet’s Lauren Fadeley Veyette had one in June. The timing suggests that many dancers came to the same conclusion. They were already losing valuable career time to COVID-19. Why not have a baby now and avoid another major career disruption? 

A career in ballet lasts only as long as a dancer’s body does. If they’re lucky, dancers can perform into their 30s—or in rare cases, into their 40s. When every season counts, taking time off to get pregnant, give birth, and recover is daunting. The challenge of professional dancers having children is the subject of photographer Lucy Gray’s Balancing Acts, a book in which she documents three dancer mothers at San Francisco Ballet and their transformations as artists after giving birth. In 2015, when Balancing Acts was published, Gray told The Cut, “Many ballerinas are afraid to have kids, and the directors don’t encourage it…. If something happens to their bodies, they can lose their job.”

There are meteoric rises, and then there’s Bash, who has watched more than one coworker climb the ranks faster than she. This might seem somehow uncouth to point out, were it not for the fact that Bash herself is glad to talk about it. “I didn’t begrudge those people,” she tells me. When she first started at CNN, she didn’t think she wanted to be on TV at all, preferring to remain behind the scenes as a sourced-up producer. And once she did move in front of the camera, she tried to keep her head down and focus on making the most of the opportunities she did have—moderating presidential debates, landing ever more impressive interviews, breaking as much news as possible, impressing the higher-ups when she filled in for Jake Tapper on State of the Union. (He is now her cohost.)

When she wonders aloud during our interview whether people who were promoted ahead of her just had a better knack for the job or more obvious talent, she doesn’t sound like someone rooting around for a compliment. She sounds like a person who knows what she’s best at—outworking the competition and learning from them too. She points to the next generation of talent—women like current CNN chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins and Inside Politics host Abby Phillip. “I have seen them, not just on air but behind the scenes, demonstrate an inner confidence that I did not have when I was that age,” she explains. “And that has helped with their rises. It’s earned,” she hastens to add, but it speaks to a skill set she felt it took her longer to develop. She could not have done what they’ve done.

If Bash took a more winding path to the top, it’s in part, she thinks, because she needed the time to build up a sense of herself that criticism and blowback couldn’t shake. In the end she didn’t read one great self-help book or have some incredible revelation. She just forced herself to do it—to stand up at press conferences, to ask the questions. The more she did it, the more confidence she had. The more experience she got, the more comfortable she felt at work.

Still, she is conscious of the forces at work that no amount of confidence can overcome—the ones that keep women from reaching their full potential. And even now, with her name on the marquee, she leans on the women who came up alongside her more than ever. She rattles off the names: Gloria Borger, Brooke Baldwin, Brianna Keiler, Poppy Harlow, Alisyn Camerota, Erin Burnett. “I just feel like I have a net because of this female camaraderie that exists and, to be frank, a place to bitch sometimes. Because it’s still a man’s world.” There are careful, unfair calibrations that women must make in the hope of navigating professional quandaries that Bash knows men don’t have to deal with—how to “not be seen as the whiner, as opposed to the go-getter,” how to not be perceived as a “diva,” when a man’s demanding behavior might be lauded as ambitious or passionate.

The women’s active group texts must have been a particular source of comfort during the last administration, when, in addition to the usual high-wire juggling act that exists for women in the workplace, Bash had to perform the added ritual of waking up in the Trump era: Get out of bed, look at the president’s now-defunct Twitter feed, and wonder, “Who is he attacking? Is he attacking me?” Some fretted over what would become of journalism once Trump left office, since the former president drove so much of the conversation, but Bash feels “reborn.”

Twenty years ago this week, Bridget Jones’s Diary hit theaters. And like the protagonist, people immediately began to expose themselves.

“It’s so aggressive,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum of the movie for The Chicago Reader. Peter Bradshaw, who was and is the chief film critic at The Guardian, devoted several lines of his review to the effects of Renée Zellweger’s famous weight gain for the role. “Her thighs are massively dimpled and her great bottom is as stately as a sinking galleon,” he wrote.

Even so, reviews were mostly positive. “The movie gives almost unreasonable pleasure,” gushed Roger Ebert. Bridget Jones became a box office smash and then a franchise. Zellweger was nominated for an Oscar. For many of us, Bridget Jones’s Diary is a perfect piece of entertainment.

But people at the time were not quite sure how to write about Bridget, a woman protagonist who is meant to be both loved and laughed at. Criticism of the movie, more than the movie itself, gives a vivid impression of just how much time has passed since April 2001. The New York Times made sure to include the protagonist’s weight—120 shocking pounds!—in the review headline.

Bridget Jones’s Diary is a mainstream movie about a woman, based on a book by a woman, adapted by a woman (with two men), and directed by a woman. That is still about as rare as it was 20 years ago. But when women critics got a word in edgewise, they too were as messy as Bridget Jones hosting a dinner party and serving blue soup and marmalade.

“I’m a Feminist—And I Love Bridget Jones’s Diary,” confessed Jessica Reaves in Time, adding defensively that she has also read Gloria Steinem. (Steinem, for her part, has written about how much she values movies that are often trivialized as “chick flicks.”) In an article published in Duke University Press in 2007, feminist theorist Angela McRobbie identifies the movie as one of the pop culture products that has been “perniciously effective in regard to [the] undoing of feminism.” McRobbie continues, seeming disturbed, “Despite feminism, Bridget wants to pursue dreams of romance, find a suitable husband, get married, and have children.”

It’s true—if feminism is a club that excludes anyone who has ever been attracted to Hugh Grant or Colin Firth, and anyone who wants to fall in love or have children, it is a very small club. (Surely trying to make women choose either sex and love or freedom is not contemporary feminism’s greatest success!) But Bridget Jones’s Diary is not a feminist movie. It is not a sexist movie. It is a movie about a woman trying to find happiness and fulfillment in spite of a culture that wants her to remain hungry, decorative, constantly reproductive, and elegant while working full time.

Younger is the little show that could. The comedy, about a 40-year-old divorcee who lies about her age to get a job in publishing, premiered in 2015 on a smaller cable network (TV Land) just as streaming became the bingeable norm. But the series managed to find its audience and stay afloat for six successful seasons—in part thanks to the show’s appeal across age lines. Younger’s depictions of motherhood, feminism, workplace politics, ageism, and love were always emotionally honest, painfully raw, and supremely empowering. 

Season six saw the show’s highest-rated premiere ever, a testament to viewers’ loyalty to Younger. But when season seven airs on April 15 on Paramount Plus, it will be the series’ last. It picks up with the steepest of cliffhangers: Following Charles’s (Peter Hermann’s) proposal, which path will Liza (Sutton Foster) choose?

Yes, six years and seven seasons in, Younger’s central love triangle—between Liza (a 40-something who at first pretended to be 26 to reinvent herself), Josh (the hunky, lovestruck tattoo artist played by Nico Tortorella), and Charles (top publisher at Liza’s company)—has kept fans invested in a way most shows cannot. For Star, that’s the heart of the show and speaks to its larger message. 

“Whether or not Liza’s with Charles or Josh romantically or the other, she still has an emotional bond to both,” Star tells Glamour. “I think that’s very much what the series is about: not defining relationships, and not defining your life by a preconceived set of rules.” 

Now that her age-old (pun intended) secret is out, Liza is able to navigate her life in a truly authentic way. But as fans have come to expect, love will not come easy: Tumbling twists and turns are thrown into the final season almost immediately. Star confirms, however, that each storyline culminates with a very satisfying conclusion by the finale in June. “That, to me, is always the toughest part of how to end a series,” he adds. 

Star attributes much of the show’s success to Foster who, on screen and behind, has helped create a welcoming, thoughtful environment. “Sutton went above and beyond in terms of how she inhabited this role, and took it further than I could have ever hoped and dreamed,” Star says. “She makes everything look effortless.”

Three years later Schwartz now has close to 20,000 followers on Instagram, a series of music videos, a packed calendar with concerts, and a vocal lessons practice, in which young girls in long pleated uniform skirts and button-down blouses practice singing Beyonce’s “Halo.”

Much of Schwartz’s motivation is what she sees as a responsibility to a future generation of religious women. “If you look at pop stars today—it is not about the music,” she says. “It’s all about sex. But I have a different mission—to empower young girls and women. Can we give them something fun, pop, where they don’t have to go and watch and listen to the other music out there?”

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Orthodox Judaism has always sent mixed messages to girls and young women interested in the performing arts.

As early as pre–World War II, theater was encouraged in Polish Jewish girls’ schools as a form of fostering self-esteem and creativity in young women, but it had to be done in strictly female spaces. This practice continued through the 20th century, when in some ways Orthodoxy became even more stringent: Beyond the school years, a talented (and trained) female voice was rarely heard. For nearly a century, then, these women have been faced with an agonizing dilemma: What do you do when you are born with a gift—but you are religiously forbidden from using it fully?

I first encountered this question when I met my sister-in-law, Franciska Kosman, who’s been singing and producing music since she was a young girl.

Kosman grew up in a rabbinic family in Moscow, where she was surrounded by a vibrant cultural scene. “Music was my second language,” she says from her home in Philadelphia. “But I always knew I had a cutoff when I would turn 12. As soon as I would be bat mitzvah and considered a woman, I would not be allowed to perform in front of men anymore.”

In the last decades, many young religious women were told that voice was a hopeless pursuit at worst, a secret hobby at best. “People didn’t look at it for women as having a career,” Schwartz says. “They always told us, ‘You only have half an audience.’”

But with Instagram, young religious women could begin taking initiative and performing and publicizing their own music online.

According to Jessica Roda, an assistant professor at Georgetown University who is writing a book about Orthodox Jewish women’s performance art, Instagram was a perfect platform for women’s music. “It became known as a necessary tool for building a business, and even in the most conservative of communities, social media is permitted for the sake of building a business,” Roda says. “That’s really interesting because art became business.”

The coronavirus pandemic has also accelerated this change, with virtual performances becoming the norm.

“COVID actually showed everyone that once you go international and you perform virtually, even if it’s half of the market audience, the world is big,” says Schwartz, whose recent Hanukkah concert sold thousands of tickets. She added, “The men’s songs are just not going to cut it. Women want to listen to female voices.”

This past year Schwartz recorded a music video with another Orthodox woman singer, Bracha Jaffe. The song is a woman’s prayer for children, in a mix of English, Hebrew, and Yiddish: “Will I ever be a mother? Will that blessing come my way? Will I stand by the candles with gratitude and pray?”

The song was in collaboration with a community fertility organization that had previously commissioned the song from a group of popular male singers. This practice has become bizarrely common in many pockets of the Orthodox community: Where women’s voices and even their faces are deemed immodest, men fill in, not unlike Shakespearean plays in the 17th century.

The balance is a fine one, and the scrutiny microscopic—one wrong move, and you’re easily dismissed. When a popular Orthodox women’s magazine reached out to interview Kosman, she was excited: Finally, some attention in the community publications for women’s music! But after the profile was written, a magazine editor emailed: The staff had watched her latest music video, and found it “disturbing,” the editor wrote somberly. The sin: The video’s background dancers had hems above their knees—not according to community modesty standards. The story was killed.

With or without external stamps of approval, though, social media has allowed these women to take their messages into their own hands, and push boundaries, too.

In my sister-in-law’s latest song, “If you wanna be,” she and rapper-poet Rochel Sam channel Lady Gaga in modest clothing—gilded thrones, white wigs, bright lipstick, boxing gloves and punching bags—angst, materialism, and spiritual aspirations collide. “I thought to myself, let me choose something from the Ethics of the Fathers,” Kosman says, referring to a rabbinic text. “It’s a preachy text, so I thought it would go well with rap.”

Unlike most of her colleagues, Kosman—who now does podcast production, because “music doesn’t pay”—chooses not to label her songs as “for women only.”

“I’m not responsible for how people use it,” she says. “I label it ‘kol isha’ instead of ‘women only’—for me, it’s like, allergen information. I’m not going to tell who should and shouldn’t listen to it.”

Kosman’s collaborator, Rochel Sam, is a single mother of three. She speaks to me via video chat from her car, her baby sleeping in the back seat. She’s wearing bright red lipstick and a mustard yellow beanie, a clip-on auburn bang of hair peeking out of the hat.

Sam was always a rapper at heart, growing up in a Lubavitch Hasidic family in Milwaukee. She has a slightly different take on the religious music industry.

“I don’t like the toxic positivity vibe, ‘Have hope, God is here for you,’” she says. “It’s overused, and there’s not always hope. I am upset with what God has done to me in life. But I couldn’t keep going without my faith, too.” She goes on, “I feel like rap is this constructive genre to channel those emotions, a medium where the anger can be most palpably conveyed.” Now, Sam is asked to perform at Sabbath tables and conferences for rabbis’ wives; one ladies’ charity dinner in Crown Heights found her performing a rap on stage with a nursing newborn in her arms, her long wig and nursing cover swaying with her.

Sam’s forthcoming song is on domestic violence; breathlessly, she dives into the rap on the video call with me: “‘Pave that road to a place she didn’t know exists, the one where she deserves all the happiness.” And then, as if awakening from a reverie, she cuts herself off: “Sorry if I’m too intense there,” and a laugh.

For Jessica Roda, the Georgetown professor, the religious women’s musical industry embodies a broader change in the community. “It’s something bigger than just a change of music,” she tells me. “It’s a change of how women can be, what women can do. A lot of these women were artists who didn’t fit into the traditional role model. They were in the margins, but the margins are coming much more to the center.”

Rap seems to be growing in popularity among young religious women, as a platform for poetry that is considerably sharper, and that may be deemed not singing, according to Jewish law, and therefore music that men can listen to.

Justine Bateman’s skin-care and makeup routine is pretty simple: moisturizer and black eyeliner. And yet, even during a time when most women are simplifying their daily look, Bateman, 55, says she’s still criticized for it. 

“I’m like, ‘Fuck it, I don’t care, I like how it looks!’” she tells Glamour. “Some people even say, ‘If she would just change her makeup, she’d look a lot prettier,’ but I don’t care. It’s cool-looking, so I’m going to keep doing it.”

The actor, best known for playing fashion-obsessed and gossip-loving middle child Mallory Keaton on the hit ’80s NBC sitcom Family Ties, has been doing things her way for decades. But now she’s gotten to a point that she no longer feels she has to make excuses for it.

“Put stuff out there that you want to do, because if it gets rejected, at least you know you were faithful to that work,” she says. “But if you put it out there to do what you think people like, then you betrayed that piece of work. So why not try to become totally deaf to the criticism? Then you can do whatever you want.”

Is she ever. Following the success of her best-selling book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, she’s written a follow-up of sorts, called Face: One Square Foot of Skin, about how viscerally society reacts to aging. Through a selection of short stories, she examines just how complicated it is for women to get older, both in and out of the spotlight.

She’s also a filmmaker, and her latest project, Violet, is an official 2021 SXSW Film Festival selection starring Olivia Munn, Justin Theroux, and Luke Bracey. “It’s been really neat even though the film was supposed to come out a year ago,” she says, citing the pandemic. “I wouldn’t want the movie to overshadow the book or vice-versa because they are both important, but I’m really excited people are starting a conversation around the topic of aging. The idea that women need to change their faces has been absorbed as a matter of fact in recent years. And I find that really disturbing.”

Bateman, who is a mom to two teenagers, has seen it firsthand, noting that she often comes in contact with women who have fewer lines on their face than her 17-year-old daughter. The point of Face, she says, is not to deter someone from getting work done but to examine why they’re really afraid of aging in the first place. “Personally, whenever I can identify the root fear that has taken hold of me that doesn’t really suit my purposes, then I can really get somewhere,” she says.

And now, after years of trying to get to the root of her fear, Bateman has answers. Here, in a candid conversation, she reveals why she was never influenced by the ’80s ideal of beauty, and why seeing the words “Justine Bateman looks old” was actually a blessing in disguise.