This Is Just My Face

by Gabourey Sidibe

  7

  Parade of Ugly

  I’m already planning my wardrobe for when I’m a director. #NotoriousB.I.G.shirtseveryday.

  —my Twitter

  IN THE SEVENTH GRADE I had a windbreaker from Conway. It was a baby blue and white Perry Ellis jacket with a zip hood in the collar. It was my first name-brand article of clothing. It wasn’t until a kid in my class told me that the jacket was “designer” that I bothered to read the name written across the back. But even I knew right away that this jacket was something special, in that color and with that hideaway hood. I’d wear it with jeans that were too big with rips at the crotch I’d cover over with iron-on cartoon patches, an oversize shirt I borrowed from my mom, and these gross, slouchy Lugz boots I’d asked for for Christmas in the fifth grade and was still growing into.

  I loved that jacket. I wore it until the ninth grade when my mom finally made me throw it out because it had holes and tears, and because women were stopping my mom and me in the street to offer me their own secondhand clothing. They thought we were too poor to afford a decent, clean girl’s jacket. My mom was mortified. I, on the other hand, was just trying to find my style. I wanted to be a tomboy. I wasn’t really a tomboy, but my best friend at the time was a pretty, skinny, black Puerto Rican girl with a big butt who was super girlie. It didn’t really make sense to compete with her, so I went in a different direction. That direction was dressing like a wayward hobo. In my twenties I realized I no longer wanted to dress like a hobo lumberjack, so I invested in a new feminine look. I wore denim miniskirts with jewel-bedazzled pockets, peasant blouses, and white socks with pink Converse sneakers that I bought for five dollars on eBay. Most of my new clothes were pink because I thought the color made me seem more dainty and brightened my dark skin. Also, I wore shades all the time. Day or night, rain or shine. And I’d coordinate the colors to match my shirts. I still borrowed my mom’s shirts, but I unbuttoned them so I could show off my bra because I was very sexy. Duh. Clearly I was still trying to find my style.

  When I started going to premieres for Precious, I shopped for dresses at Torrid, a plus-size clothing store. I bought prom dresses. For the Sundance Film Festival, which is cool and casual, I chose a bubble-gum-pink tube dress with pockets in the skirt, a black shrug, and black knee boots. I walked the carpet by myself, clutching an oversize Gucci purse that Sarah, the film’s producer, had given me. For Cannes, I found a black dress with a ton of ruffles. I paired it with another shrug, a fake pearl necklace I borrowed from Mom, and kitten heels. I blended in that night and my entire outfit cost $120!

  For a Cannes press conference with the actors in the film, I was told that the dress code was “casual.” That was a lie. Every waking moment at Cannes is black-tie, but I didn’t know that. I wore the only heels I could walk in, a pair of brown wedges, and a green floral-print dress that I thought was too short, so I put on jean capris underneath. If you think that sounds bad, keep in mind that I had to stand between Mariah Carey and Paula Patton for every picture. There! Now you know it wasn’t just bad, it was a nightmare. But the day wasn’t all horrible. Later I met Debbie Harry while wearing a T-shirt with her face on it. Fashion WIN!

  Photo Op You DON’T know pressure until you’ve had to stand directly in between Paula Patton and Mariah Carey in clothes you bought from a mall and Payless shoes. What do you know about the struggle?! I’m a fucking SURVIVOR!

  © Getty Images

  At both the Sundance and Cannes premieres, I was scared to death. Paula and Mariah were both so pretty, and both had an entire team of people to make sure they looked good. Stylists, assistants, hairstylists, makeup artists, publicists. I had none of those people. I didn’t have any money to pay for all that.

  But I was the face of our film. I played the title character, so I had to show up no matter how inappropriate my outfit. At Sundance, my costar Mo’Nique kindly had her hair and makeup artist prepare me for the premiere, but the rest of the time I made myself up even though I had no clue how. I felt like a contest winner—in a bad way. Like I didn’t really belong on the red carpets, but I’d sold the most raffle tickets, so the powers that be were allowing me to feel fancy for a night, but in the morning I’d have to go back to working the phones at the call center . . . or something.

  When Precious was picked up for distribution by Lionsgate, I’d already won a few awards and was on the verge of being nominated for more. The company hired a stylist to dress me for the rest of the awards season and paid for hair and makeup as well. I finally had a team to make sure I looked presentable the next time I had to stand next to Mariah! The stylist, Linda, and her assistant met me at my hotel in LA. They brought a ton of clothes to my room, and I tried everything on. Linda didn’t know me and didn’t really know my style. I figured that was fine, because I didn’t really know my style yet, either. (I still missed my Perry Ellis jacket!)

  Linda asked me what I’d seen in magazines that I liked. She asked what I wanted to look like, what kind of dresses I liked, what colors I wanted to wear. I didn’t know how to answer any of those questions. I’d never opened a magazine and thought, I want to look like this! The closest I’d ever come was watching Moesha as a teenager and wishing I could dress like Moesha’s best friend, Kim. She was a big girl, and so was I, but she always had a boyfriend, so I figured that I should dress like her. Somehow I knew that saying this to Linda—saying “Moesha’s best friend” to a woman whose other clients included Cameron Diaz and Helen Hunt—was the wrong answer. So I said the only thing I knew for sure: “I don’t need a dress that will stand out. I’ll do that anyway. I just want to look like I belong.”

  She seemed optimistic that I’d fit in. She suggested that I start buying magazines and paying attention to fashion trends and saving pictures of dresses that I liked. So, yes, this is the story of what it’s like to choose a dress for a glamorous award ceremony. You’re probably thinking, How hard could that be? Sounds like the most fun part! Hold ON. Not so fast. Have you forgotten about the Fashion Police? Have you forgotten about the blogs and the fashion reporters? Have you forgotten the Denim Debacle that Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears wore to the American Music Awards in 2001? I haven’t. I had a discussion about that outfit at a dinner party last night. The world hasn’t forgotten and it never will. What’s worse is that I thought those outfits were dope. That’s right. I would’ve been all the way onboard with that decision. This is why it was dangerous for me to flip through magazines for trends and dresses I liked.

  I didn’t know it then, but my personal fashion icon was and is Lena Dunham. I’ve been in the same room as Lena about eight times, and I’ve only really had one conversation with her. It was the day after the 2014 Emmys. At the show I’d worn this beautiful, flowing, orange Octavio Carlin dress that took a team of red-carpet scientists to tug and straighten (my bra made an appearance in every picture). Before the Emmys even started, I’d ripped the skirt and broken my makeup compact. I was looking around for a place I could stash my heels, already feeling like a contest winner, when I saw Lena. She was across the room wearing a collared blouse with capped sleeves tucked into a huge, poofy, pink Giambattista Valli skirt. I overheard someone nearby state her opinion of the outfit, but it wasn’t my opinion, so it was wrong and really not worth repeating. In that instant I knew I had found my hero.

  Lena’s skirt was so big and fluffy! I imagined what it might feel like to sit on it in one of those hard theater chairs. Maybe it was like sitting on pillows or, even better, marshmallows. It was at least four kinds of pink. Her hair was freshly bleached blonde, and she made me think of a baby sitting on a cloud of cotton candy. She looked fearless. Confident. If she felt like a contest winner, she didn’t show it. She didn’t seem positive that she belonged there, either, but her attitude said, “Fuck you! I’m here, and this is my skirt, bitches!” It was magic, and ever since, I’ve gotten a thrill from seeing her on a red carpet.

  Here’s the thing. Lena doesn’t just have confidence.
Confidence is easier than what I see in Lena. I see something that says, “I know what I am and what I’m worth, and if you don’t like it, you don’t exist. Also, my skirt is PINK!” It’s not confidence. It’s privilege. Now usually a black girl talking about a white girl having privilege is a commentary on race and class. Not this time. This time I’m just talking about dresses. Lena seems to have granted herself immunity from all of the bad shit, stress, and worry that accompanies a red carpet. It’s like she wakes up and checks her calendar, and says, “Gee! The Golden Globes are this weekend. I wanna wear . . . YELLOW!” And somehow a yellow dress shows up, and come that weekend, she’s on the carpet in a yellow dress thinking, Fuck, yeah! YELLOW! while somewhere in the background I’m sweating with one heel in my hand, trying to find my seat, and hoping that my dress photographed well so that those bitches on Fashion Police don’t talk shit about me.

  Before I found Lena for my style guru, I didn’t really know what I wanted to wear. But my stylist Linda knew, and she had the ability to pull out some really fancy dresses that my prom dresses could never compete with. So I let her make most of my fashion decisions for me. I thought that most of the dresses I wore were really pretty, but I can’t say that I wore anything that was my style. Eventually, I found a stylist who specialized in plus-size style. Marcy Guevara-Prete is a beautiful, plus-size girlie girl who believes that every woman, regardless of size, should feel special all the time. She wears clothes I want to wear. Dresses with tulip skirts that fly out when she spins around. Cute leather boots with a matching leather vest and big pretty jewelry. She understands my plus-size body and helps me dress it in clothing that I’d actually pick out for myself.

  I like to think red carpets are like that ’90s TV show American Gladiators. The show matched amateur athletes against professional bodybuilders with names like Nitro, Turbo, and Hawk in games of strength and agility. I am the amateur athlete. The red carpet is the test of agility. Cameron Diaz is Nitro, Penelope Cruz is Turbo, and Jennifer Lopez is Hawk (obviously). Armed with my stylist Marcy, my confidence, and the ability to quickly pick it up when it falls, I run as fast as I can through the gauntlet of actors, interviewers, and photographers—straight to the prize. The prize is the bottle of champagne I’m going to allow myself to drink on my way to my seat.

  Now I don’t actually know Lena or what she’s thinking on the red carpet. I could be completely wrong about her. After all, people look at me and see a beacon of self-confidence even though I’m nervous and feel like a freak a lot of the time and worry that Giuliana Rancic and Billy Bush can smell my fear. I get out of that SUV, I step onto the red carpet, and I’m standing in line behind the Amy Adamses, the Jennifer Lawrences, and the Kate Hudsons. They’re all so beautiful, with unimpressed faces and hand-sewn dresses that I could never fit into and will never be sexy enough to pull off. None of them are sweating. My confidence falls and crashes at my feet, and I wish I’d had one more drink before getting in the car. I never understand addiction more than when I’m on a red carpet. I just want to be numb.

  But just when I’m thinking, Never again! and I am afraid I’ll have a panic attack, I see Lena. She’s wearing something that I wouldn’t choose for myself, but it’s a pretty color and she’s smiling. She looks happy. She’s like a lighthouse. She becomes my beacon of confidence. She’s talented, and she’s there because she’s earned it. Like me. They don’t give out tickets at Chuck E. Cheese’s to award shows. I’m invited because I do good work and I choose cool projects. Seeing her reminds me of that. I remember to feel pretty, talented, and at home on the red carpet in my big, flowing, soon-to-be-ripped dress. By the way, when I became a director, I truly did wear a Biggie shirt, paired with an African-print skirt, every single day. There’s nothing more fashion-forward than being the fucking BOSS!

  8

  A Door of One’s Own

  Why do you hate me?

  Because you’re ugly.

  —Welcome to the Dollhouse

  I’M NOT A HUGE FAN of Christmas the way most people are. People love it for all the lights and pretty decorations and family time filled with old traditions. Jesus or Kwanzaa-God, whoever that might be. Christmas is for families, but as you know by now, my family is very small. My mom has a ton of siblings, but they all live in the South. My father . . . well, you know, his family’s in Africa, and he’s not invited to our nontraditional, nonholiday holidays for the time being. No. I’m not a big fan of Christmas. It just reminds me of what I don’t have anymore.

  When Ahmed and I were kids, and my parents were still married to each other, Christmas was pretty amazing. I’d start begging my mom to put up our plastic tree in the living room next to the terrace sometime around Halloween. About a week before Christmas, the tree would finally go up, and my mom, brother, and I would decorate it together while my dad was out driving his cab. Late at night, around 2 a.m., my dad would pick up my brother and me, and take us to see the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Ahmed and I would fight over who got to sit up front. Ahmed always won. The city was quiet and the tree was beautiful. My dad would make an empty promise to take us skating during the daytime, and then we’d get back in the car, and he’d drive us to White Castle for tiny burgers and onion rings (onion rings were a delicacy to me as a child).

  The weekend before Christmas, my dad would drive us all to a mall so that my mom could buy us Christmas gifts. Believing in Santa Claus was for other families. Sometimes I’d help my mom wrap the gifts. We were in on what we were getting so it wasn’t a big deal.

  On Christmas Eve, my mom would let us open one gift, and then we’d go to bed as early as possible in hopes that Christmas Day would come faster than most days. In the morning we’d have to wait until my parents woke up to open our gifts, so my brother and I would make as much noise as possible, and then we’d resort to poking and shaking them until they got out of bed. We’d tear open the gifts that we’d been waiting to open since we went shopping for them. There were always another one or two great presents we didn’t know about. My mom made sure to keep a few of our gifts a secret from us so we’d still have surprises on Christmas morning. Later in the day, my mom would take us to my uncle’s house, and we’d collect more gifts there. Those were our traditions.

  My dad had a tradition of his own. He would buy himself a Hess toy truck every year and forbid us to touch it. I’m serious. My grown-up father would buy himself a toy, and he wouldn’t let us, his children, play with it. I always waited for him to go to work so I could have it to myself. But he always knew, so he started hiding it before he left. That made it into a game for me. I’d find it, play with it, and put it back before he got home. I played with it because . . . fuck him. It’s a toy. My right to play with it was certainly more important than his right to have something for himself, right?

  After my parents separated, we stopped taking holidays seriously in my family. Thanksgiving was no exception. After my parents split, my mother, brother, and I have always found some place other than my mom’s apartment to be for Thanksgiving. It used to be my aunt Dorothy’s until she moved to Florida. Then it became my mother’s cousin’s not far from where we lived in Harlem. For a couple of years, I made a tradition with my high school best friend, Crystal, and we cooked together, but that died out as well. So I was back at my mom’s apartment. This meant a baked chicken, rice, and a weird peach cobbler with toast for a crust. This also meant that we three would each grab a plate whenever we felt like it; that we’d each take that plate to a separate room, usually in front of a TV; and that we’d each stay as far away from one another as you can stay in a two-bedroom apartment, my mom on her bed in the living room, my brother in his room, and me in mine. We never sat together to eat. Almost never have we eaten at the same time.

  To understand how we got to this point, you have to understand a bit about New York real estate. Shit is expensive. My mom had to pay Dorothy eight hundred dollars a month for our small room with two twin beds. At first, Ahmed and I switched off s
leeping with Mom. But eventually she decided I was too big to share a twin bed. I wasn’t too old. I was just too big. So I slept alone, and Ahmed and Mom shared a bed. Our worlds revolved around four hundred square feet. Ahmed and I did our homework in the same room, and we went to bed after fighting over Nintendo in the same room. We lived closer together than ever, and we grew further apart. Familiarity breeds contempt, and we got so we couldn’t stand one another.

  We lived with my aunt Dorothy for two years before we moved into a studio apartment on the twenty-eighth floor of a building in West Harlem. We had an amazing view of Riverside Park, downtown Manhattan, and New Jersey. It was a subsidized-housing apartment building, which means that the government alleviated some of the housing cost, but the building was privately owned. The rent for our studio pie in the sky was probably around $1,200 when we moved in, but because of the government assistance, my mom paid around $350 a month. If we lived in the projects, we would’ve paid less.

  My brother wanted us to move to the Lillian Wald projects on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He lobbied for it because all of his friends lived there. I disagreed, but I also understood. All of my friends lived there, too. I had a lot of super-fun times in the projects across the street from my junior high school. (I went to Junior High 22, usually screamed “TWENTY-TWO!!” while walking around the basketball courts with friends.) We would hang out all night in the park or the handball court in Baruch Houses across the street and were always bound to run into people we knew. But I was worried that if we actually lived in the projects my family would never get out. It’s not rare to see a family living in the same project neighborhood for three generations or even under the same project apartment roof for that long. I know of a couple that met when they were living in the same project building. They fell in love and got married but still lived in separate apartments on different floors with their own families because even together they didn’t make enough money to move out. Instead, they were both on a waiting list for their own project apartment. Most of my friends from the projects still live there today. I say this without judgment, as I know we were one missed rent payment away from being put out on our asses from our subsidized-housing apartment.