You Beauty is a performance written as a book — a meta exploration of class and identity that places you, the reader, in the role of the slightly peeved theatregoer navigating a night out in uncomfortable new boots, tracing a genealogy from Shaw's Pygmalion to My Fair Lady to Mish Grigor's own stage show Class Act.
About This Book
What does it mean to have taste, and who gets to have it? You Beauty approaches questions of class and identity not through theory but through second-person performance writing — the reader becomes the protagonist, standing in for the middle-class cultural consumer who attends the right shows, reads the right mailing lists, and wears the right boots. Written by Mish Grigor with characteristic wit, this book documents a theatrical lineage that runs from George Bernard Shaw through the Hollywood musical to live contemporary performance, collapsing the distance between audience and subject. A rare piece of writing that is genuinely funny while doing serious cultural work.
Key Features
- 144 pages of performance writing, second-person narrative, and cultural criticism
- Written by Mish Grigor with text contributions from Zoey Dawson and Sheila Ngoc Pham; edited by Elena Gomez
- Engages with Class Act (Grigor's theatre show), My Fair Lady, and George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion
- Published by APHIDS, ISBN 9780992361952
What You'll Discover
- How second-person prose can implicate the reader directly in a critique of middle-class cultural performance
- The genealogy connecting Shaw's Pygmalion to the Hollywood musical My Fair Lady to Grigor's contemporary stage work Class Act
- How humour functions as a critical tool in writing about class — disarming the reader while sharpening the argument
- The relationship between live performance and the book as form, with the text itself operating as a kind of script for its audience
About the Author
Mish Grigor is co-director of APHIDS, a Melbourne-based performance company. She has written for The Guardian and REALTIME, and has contributed to essay collections including Melbourne on Film: Cinema That Defines Our City (Black Inc) and Let's Go Outside: Art in Public (Monash University Publishing).
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 144
- Dimensions: 14.8 x 10.5 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780992361952
- Publisher: APHIDS
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Readers interested in performance writing, cultural criticism, class and identity in contemporary Australia, and the intersections between live art and the printed page.