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The Most Normal Woman: Essays on Appearances
Weaving critical commentary with personal experience, the author explores Botox, blondeness, exercise addiction, and subcultures including the underground drag scene and competitive dog shows to better understand how beauty is judged and defined. From Berlin nightclubs to rural Mayo, from Versailles to the Ringsend Recycling Centre, Kiberd takes us on a journey of obsession led by the question: am I normal yet?
- GenresEssays
304 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 27, 2026
About the author
Róisín Kiberd
10 books38 followersRoisín Kiberd's essays have appeared in the Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly and the anthology "Seizing the Memes of Production." Her writing on technology and culture has appeared in the Guardian, the Outline, Vice UK and Motherboard, where she wrote a column about internet subcultures. Her first book, the essay collection "The Disconnect, was published in 2021.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
Review of advance copy
“The Rose Dome is a forcefield against modernity, a world within a world, like a fairy fort, underground, where undying, unageing beings dance in eternity. I found the event boring, but also fuzzy, nostalgic, the recitals and speeches reminding me of when I was at school. The Roses were what our teachers wanted us to become - straight-spined, clear-eyed, capable of delivering speeches learned by heart”
Roisin Kiberd, “The Truth In Her Eyes Ever Dawning”
1
I picked up Roisin Kiberd’s first book, The Disconnect, on a whim after spotting it for sale not long after release in 2021, at a time when the plague years had forced me to live my life on a screen. I’d never heard of Roisin Kiberd, but the subject matter and several review quotes on the cover drew me in - I’d been recommending Siobhan McKeown’s A Life Lived Remotely, “a memoir of being and work in the digital age” to anyone who’d listen for a year at that point. McKeown and Kiberd had both been extremely online at a time when that still took a degree of effort, as opposed to being a given, and could accordingly chart how our sense of reality was being warped by the internet.
My first thought upon reading it was I had clearly been nowhere near as online as I thought I was throughout my adolescence and twenties. I found myself coming back to the book on several occasions over the next few years, as I became increasingly aware of how the negative effect of the internet on society was starting to warp my own mind, and reading things like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Twittering Machine and Filling The Void which gave me a vocabulary to understand this unease. Kiberd’s book became the book I recommended to people when we talked about the subject - like McKeown’s, it was never a dry theoretical exercise but lightly combined its obvious learnedness with storytelling nous and adept prose.
Her follow-up being about “beauty” made perfect sense to me - what else are cosmetic surgery, perfume or hair dyes but an extension of how we use technology to alter ourselves and try to influence how other people see us, much as the internet is?
2
It was the full implications of the title that drew me in. Not “The most beautiful”, the “the most normal”.
Normal. That loaded term. To say someone is “normal” requires the existence of the abnormal who need to be excluded, as if they were barbarians gathered outside the walls threatening those inside. Kiberd, through an eclectic series of very carefully sequenced essays which progress from discussions of phenomena related to appearance such as, but not limited to, Botox, the Hermes Birkin1 , Barbie dolls and fitness regimes to a broader critique of how these technologies and cultural movements feed into a broader power structure which reinforces the cultural power of normality through presenting aspirational and expected standards of appearance. The performance and embodiment of “appearance” as a lived standard in something like the Rose of Tralee, is as articulated in the quote that opens this review, a reiteration of social expectations enforced from a very early age.
3
These expectations, particularly in regard to appearance, are obviously far more potent for girls and women than for men, and from a much earlier age. Kiberd’s analysis, which certainly focuses heavily on female experience, incorporates examples of how appearance is used to enforce social expectations for men, LGBT people and even animals. What recurs throughout these is a sense that the body is something to be manipulated and optimised to better respond to the demands of normality, which is often a reflection of the most dominant cultural forces in a given era. Our own society has far more in common with the dystopia in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was at least partially a satire on the ideas advocated by 19th and early 20th century Social Darwinism and eugenics, than we want to admit - just consider the worrying preoccupation on blaming genetics for everything and arguing for what’re ultimately technological solutions to health problems caused by social factors, such as Ozempic.
Michael J Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit, argued that neoliberalism had propagated what he termed an “ethic of responsibility” in which success and failure were at heart the individual’s own fault for not trying hard enough. In Sandel’s account, this had in turn bred a culture of resentment in the West towards the educational and political establishment amongst those left behind by major economic shifts that left them adrift, especially after 2008. The internet has disseminated a version of this logic to the realm of appearance, making those who feel left out of conventional beauty standards (which are often clearly racially and cisgender-coded - the relatively pluralist popular culture of the 1970s feels as much of a relic of a more egalitarian time as leftist authors being on TV) pressured to change themselves to fit in. It’s hard to dismiss this as a superficial concern when being deemed unattractive by others can leave you locked out of being able to afford a home in the absence of a romantic partner to buy one with, amongst much else. When large sections of a society can blame someone for being unemployed and losing their home because they “didn’t learn to code”, it isn’t hard to blame someone for being alone due to not doing enough to address their appearance. It’s hardly a coincidence that plastic surgery has boomed since the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s, and the countries where it is most visible in society, such as South Korea, are those most openly influenced by neoliberal economics.
This idea of self-optimisation, often in defiance of the body's natural limits, extends into other spheres. We are bombarded with images of what would once have been outlandish feats of extended physical capacity brought about by rigorous self-discipline and elite medical treatment - three of the most prominent sporting figures in the world, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Le Bron James, continue to perform at a high level on, or very near, their 40th birthday. Practically all their forebears through history had long moved on to making crisp advertisements by that age.
Perhaps this was anticipated by the extreme plastic surgeries of the 1985 film Brazil. A better example yet is the 1992 film Death Becomes Her, in which a potion offering eternal life and youth can be attained at the cost of forsaking the body’s natural limits. What else is there to aspire to, even if attaining this drives us to madness upon realising the horror inherent in a life without end?
4
Normality, like any other ideology of exclusion operates across different spheres of our lives. Race, sexuality, socioeconomic class, creed, disability, gender and most importantly for Kiberd’s analysis, neurodiversity.
Neurodivergent, much like “normal”, is a term that implies its opposite by definition. There is, in medical terms, no such thing as a neurotypical person. The term itself has attracted criticism for implying this false binary as well as being overly broad with regard to the nature of what’s referred to by it. However, it does provide a useful framework for medical practitioners, educators and parents to articulate a wide range of perceived differences from what is considered normal, particularly in kids and teenagers.
However, as pointed out by Audre Lorde, we do not live single-issue lives. In the case of neurodiversity, there have been major discrepancies in rates of diagnosis between boys and girls. I was diagnosed with what was then called Asperger’s Syndrome at a very early age (6), and practically all supporting literature available in the early 2000s referred to boys - indeed, the tests in the 1930s for which the disorder is named were nearly all conducted on boys2. Asperger himself no doubt shared a lot of the gender biases of his era, and can’t quite be separated from the eugenicist currents prominent at the time as well as the fixation for pathologising and labelling which characterised Victorian society3. This has unfortunately extended into our present era, wherein the wave of diagnoses amongst kids born in the late 1980s and early 1990s often bypassed girls entirely with little focus on how these differences presented in girls - indeed, almost every cultural representation of an explicitly autistic character in film and television was male until fairly recently, even though the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope was right there4.
Kiberd is only a year or two older than I am but writes here about she only started to become much more aware of how a lifelong sense of not fitting in was probably due to being neurodivergent over the course of the process of writing this book. This is no doubt at least partially due to the fixation on diagnosing and pathologising boys in the 1990s, with limited focus on how it presented in girls.
Could it be, that when pressure to fit in and self-optimise across different spheres is much more acutely felt amongst girls than boys growing up, that self-policing and what’s called “masking” behaviour start at a much earlier age and largely unprompted?
5
The text is interspersed with short interludes written from the perspective of an alien living amongst people (think Under the Skin). We only see appearances as representations of the Other, our own sense of whether we’re normal increasingly judged against their outward presentation. We can’t but on some level, especially as children and teenagers, fear being cast outside it. Even our efforts to differentiate ourselves often fall into the trap of conforming, of “expressing individuality by identifying with a group”.
Ultimately, a book about appearances is one about a particular society’s idea of what is normal, and what lengths we will go to in order to achieve this when there’s often very real consequences from being excluded. Rates of suicide, homelessness and unemployment are notably higher amongst transgender and neurodivergent people.
The big question is - in what interests do we construct normal, especially as regards to appearances, and in whose interests does it serve? This book is a great starting point for considering that conversation from our own perspective.
Roisin Kiberd, “The Truth In Her Eyes Ever Dawning”
1
I picked up Roisin Kiberd’s first book, The Disconnect, on a whim after spotting it for sale not long after release in 2021, at a time when the plague years had forced me to live my life on a screen. I’d never heard of Roisin Kiberd, but the subject matter and several review quotes on the cover drew me in - I’d been recommending Siobhan McKeown’s A Life Lived Remotely, “a memoir of being and work in the digital age” to anyone who’d listen for a year at that point. McKeown and Kiberd had both been extremely online at a time when that still took a degree of effort, as opposed to being a given, and could accordingly chart how our sense of reality was being warped by the internet.
My first thought upon reading it was I had clearly been nowhere near as online as I thought I was throughout my adolescence and twenties. I found myself coming back to the book on several occasions over the next few years, as I became increasingly aware of how the negative effect of the internet on society was starting to warp my own mind, and reading things like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Twittering Machine and Filling The Void which gave me a vocabulary to understand this unease. Kiberd’s book became the book I recommended to people when we talked about the subject - like McKeown’s, it was never a dry theoretical exercise but lightly combined its obvious learnedness with storytelling nous and adept prose.
Her follow-up being about “beauty” made perfect sense to me - what else are cosmetic surgery, perfume or hair dyes but an extension of how we use technology to alter ourselves and try to influence how other people see us, much as the internet is?
2
It was the full implications of the title that drew me in. Not “The most beautiful”, the “the most normal”.
Normal. That loaded term. To say someone is “normal” requires the existence of the abnormal who need to be excluded, as if they were barbarians gathered outside the walls threatening those inside. Kiberd, through an eclectic series of very carefully sequenced essays which progress from discussions of phenomena related to appearance such as, but not limited to, Botox, the Hermes Birkin1 , Barbie dolls and fitness regimes to a broader critique of how these technologies and cultural movements feed into a broader power structure which reinforces the cultural power of normality through presenting aspirational and expected standards of appearance. The performance and embodiment of “appearance” as a lived standard in something like the Rose of Tralee, is as articulated in the quote that opens this review, a reiteration of social expectations enforced from a very early age.
3
These expectations, particularly in regard to appearance, are obviously far more potent for girls and women than for men, and from a much earlier age. Kiberd’s analysis, which certainly focuses heavily on female experience, incorporates examples of how appearance is used to enforce social expectations for men, LGBT people and even animals. What recurs throughout these is a sense that the body is something to be manipulated and optimised to better respond to the demands of normality, which is often a reflection of the most dominant cultural forces in a given era. Our own society has far more in common with the dystopia in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was at least partially a satire on the ideas advocated by 19th and early 20th century Social Darwinism and eugenics, than we want to admit - just consider the worrying preoccupation on blaming genetics for everything and arguing for what’re ultimately technological solutions to health problems caused by social factors, such as Ozempic.
Michael J Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit, argued that neoliberalism had propagated what he termed an “ethic of responsibility” in which success and failure were at heart the individual’s own fault for not trying hard enough. In Sandel’s account, this had in turn bred a culture of resentment in the West towards the educational and political establishment amongst those left behind by major economic shifts that left them adrift, especially after 2008. The internet has disseminated a version of this logic to the realm of appearance, making those who feel left out of conventional beauty standards (which are often clearly racially and cisgender-coded - the relatively pluralist popular culture of the 1970s feels as much of a relic of a more egalitarian time as leftist authors being on TV) pressured to change themselves to fit in. It’s hard to dismiss this as a superficial concern when being deemed unattractive by others can leave you locked out of being able to afford a home in the absence of a romantic partner to buy one with, amongst much else. When large sections of a society can blame someone for being unemployed and losing their home because they “didn’t learn to code”, it isn’t hard to blame someone for being alone due to not doing enough to address their appearance. It’s hardly a coincidence that plastic surgery has boomed since the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s, and the countries where it is most visible in society, such as South Korea, are those most openly influenced by neoliberal economics.
This idea of self-optimisation, often in defiance of the body's natural limits, extends into other spheres. We are bombarded with images of what would once have been outlandish feats of extended physical capacity brought about by rigorous self-discipline and elite medical treatment - three of the most prominent sporting figures in the world, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Le Bron James, continue to perform at a high level on, or very near, their 40th birthday. Practically all their forebears through history had long moved on to making crisp advertisements by that age.
Perhaps this was anticipated by the extreme plastic surgeries of the 1985 film Brazil. A better example yet is the 1992 film Death Becomes Her, in which a potion offering eternal life and youth can be attained at the cost of forsaking the body’s natural limits. What else is there to aspire to, even if attaining this drives us to madness upon realising the horror inherent in a life without end?
4
Normality, like any other ideology of exclusion operates across different spheres of our lives. Race, sexuality, socioeconomic class, creed, disability, gender and most importantly for Kiberd’s analysis, neurodiversity.
Neurodivergent, much like “normal”, is a term that implies its opposite by definition. There is, in medical terms, no such thing as a neurotypical person. The term itself has attracted criticism for implying this false binary as well as being overly broad with regard to the nature of what’s referred to by it. However, it does provide a useful framework for medical practitioners, educators and parents to articulate a wide range of perceived differences from what is considered normal, particularly in kids and teenagers.
However, as pointed out by Audre Lorde, we do not live single-issue lives. In the case of neurodiversity, there have been major discrepancies in rates of diagnosis between boys and girls. I was diagnosed with what was then called Asperger’s Syndrome at a very early age (6), and practically all supporting literature available in the early 2000s referred to boys - indeed, the tests in the 1930s for which the disorder is named were nearly all conducted on boys2. Asperger himself no doubt shared a lot of the gender biases of his era, and can’t quite be separated from the eugenicist currents prominent at the time as well as the fixation for pathologising and labelling which characterised Victorian society3. This has unfortunately extended into our present era, wherein the wave of diagnoses amongst kids born in the late 1980s and early 1990s often bypassed girls entirely with little focus on how these differences presented in girls - indeed, almost every cultural representation of an explicitly autistic character in film and television was male until fairly recently, even though the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope was right there4.
Kiberd is only a year or two older than I am but writes here about she only started to become much more aware of how a lifelong sense of not fitting in was probably due to being neurodivergent over the course of the process of writing this book. This is no doubt at least partially due to the fixation on diagnosing and pathologising boys in the 1990s, with limited focus on how it presented in girls.
Could it be, that when pressure to fit in and self-optimise across different spheres is much more acutely felt amongst girls than boys growing up, that self-policing and what’s called “masking” behaviour start at a much earlier age and largely unprompted?
5
The text is interspersed with short interludes written from the perspective of an alien living amongst people (think Under the Skin). We only see appearances as representations of the Other, our own sense of whether we’re normal increasingly judged against their outward presentation. We can’t but on some level, especially as children and teenagers, fear being cast outside it. Even our efforts to differentiate ourselves often fall into the trap of conforming, of “expressing individuality by identifying with a group”.
Ultimately, a book about appearances is one about a particular society’s idea of what is normal, and what lengths we will go to in order to achieve this when there’s often very real consequences from being excluded. Rates of suicide, homelessness and unemployment are notably higher amongst transgender and neurodivergent people.
The big question is - in what interests do we construct normal, especially as regards to appearances, and in whose interests does it serve? This book is a great starting point for considering that conversation from our own perspective.
October 3, 2026
And then they realised they were no longer normal girls, they were normal women.
September 13, 2026
The writing was insanely good.
September 3, 2026
Jesus Christ I was very opportunistic going into this, but it was better than I thought. There's just a brilliant seamlessness through the tackling of the different concepts and ideas in here, where call backs towards things previously said felt natural and thought provoking in it of itself. I think towards the end of the drag section, where I had been forming my own thoughts on what I was thinking about it, when the same thoughts then appeared on the page surrounding trans people that took me from having a very enjoyable and introspective read to something above and beyond that. I found myself able to mirror my last experiences as well (who doesn't browse while imagining a better, more perfect self if they buy the clothes in front of them, online or off?) It's great for giving moments to think for yourself, as in it's a very thought provoking piece and it lends itself to both personal and societal reflections. It felt very personal, I'm not sure if that's normal for non fiction but I enjoyed that part all the same.
Even days later I'm thinking about it, it sticks to the memory and it won't be something I'll forget soon
Even days later I'm thinking about it, it sticks to the memory and it won't be something I'll forget soon
Review of advance copy
Oh how I loved this book of essays, the latest from brilliant Tramp Press, out next week. More a sequence than a collection, it moves seamlessly through the beauty and fashion industries (who knew the histories of Birkin bags, botox and perfume could be so thrilling?) and then into various beauty contests, from pageants (both human and AI) to bodybuilding, drag shows and dog shows. And the ingenious final essay then reframes this study of “the mythology of normal” as a pursuit not of beauty or normality but belonging. It’s clever, funny, self-aware, and deft in its weaving of both pop culture and the personal. It’s an Important Book that doesn’t strain to be that, and a showcase of what the essay form can do.
September 20, 2026
I enjoy a lot about how Róisín Kiberd writes and thinks. Some of it I struggle to follow but there is an abstract weaving and an intensity to her thought I find both reserved and compelling. I am glad I read this book.
September 6, 2026
Clever
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews