‘Why at 63-years-old, I’m turning my back on botox’

Although I am almost 64, I have no idea if I look it. I’ve met women my age who have faces so baked by sunlight and braised by smoking that they could play my mother in a biopic.

And I see women with brows so smooth and necks so tight that they could be any age at all. It reminds me of the first time I announced I was pregnant more than three decades ago.

My family was astonished because they assumed my advanced age of 30 meant I wasn’t going to have kids at all. My city friends were amazed that I was rushing into it so young.

Although I am almost 64, I have no idea if I look it. I’ve met women my age who have faces so baked by sunlight and braised by smoking that they could play my mother in a biopic

In the semi-rural area where I spend weekends and summers, the consensus seems to be that I look awfully good for my age now. But back in the city, there are women who believe I’ve waited too long to do what needs to be done.

But I haven’t waited. I’ve balked. I am a novelist. My business is telling stories, and my face tells one, and I just can’t bear to edit it too much.

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Don’t get me wrong: I am not insensible to my own appearance. I moisturise and mascara, exfoliate and wax, wear lipstick to a restaurant launch and concealer to an evening dinner. I am not averse to taking action on my face.

A photo taken at a book signing sent me to the dermatologist some years ago, a photo in which I was contented and rested yet somehow looked crabby and exhausted.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not insensible to my own appearance. I moisturise and mascara, exfoliate and wax, wear lipstick to a restaurant launch and concealer to an evening dinner. I am not averse to taking action on my face

When I was 50 a doctor got rid of the ‘number 11’ lines between my brows, the result of accumulated frowns – worrying over my children’s ear infections, homework assignments, and missed curfews. Not long after, a technician zapped the sun spots from the beaches of my youth.

The filler I had injected around my lips at 55 made me look slightly more as though I had lips, but not so much that I had to lie about some new lip liner technique.

But that’s as far as I’ll go. It’s not simply that I’ve encountered too many women whose foreheads have become frozen because of facelifts. I am also too afraid my fixed face would be a false face, and I’d be stuck with it forever.

Those who argue that you can’t prevail at work if you look tired and aged, I sympathise. Luckily in my business the visual signs of wisdom are the gold standard; Diana Athill, Alice Munro, Fay Weldon.

And those of you hooked on cosmetic help because you were once beauties and are trying to remain so, I get it. I was never beautiful. I was what you’d call cute.

Those who argue that you can’t prevail at work if you look tired and aged, I sympathise. Luckily in my business the visual signs of wisdom are the gold standard; Diana Athill, Alice Munro, Fay Weldon

Cute has a short sell-by date, and it cannot be conferred with a scalpel. I’ve stood in front of the mirror and pulled up the slack skin around my jawline to see what I would look like if I paid some doctor to lift and tuck.

Tighter, certainly, but not like my younger self, with her plumped-up cheeks, her unmarked neck. Look at that skin! It barely has pores! It’s the open face of someone who knows nothing.

‘God has given you one face’, Shakespeare wrote, ‘and you make yourself another’. Mine is the face of a woman whose mother died young and who has been able to live decades longer than she did.

It’s the face of a woman who once felt she was a bit of a babe but has ceded that territory to the babe she once birthed.

It’s unseemly and ungenerous to compete with my daughter in the fresh-face department.

‘God has given you one face’, Shakespeare wrote, ‘and you make yourself another’. Mine is the face of a woman whose mother died young and who has been able to live decades longer than she did

And I sometimes feel as though the lines, the furrows, the creases, are a reminder of what my mother would have seen in the mirror at my age if she’d been lucky enough to live that long. She would have traded meeting her grandchildren for losing her jawline in a nanosecond, I’m sure. 

There’s a moment in A Christmas Carol when Scrooge realises the Ghost of Christmas Past has ‘a face, in which, in some strange way, there were fragments of all the faces it had shown him’ in his former life.

My face is a record of my past. There’s a small scar just below my lower lip where I put a tooth through when I fell as a toddler.

There’s a broad bump on my nose from the time I fell face-first on a gravel driveway and broke it at age 11. Recently a cosmetic surgeon told me he could make the scar less visible and the bump less prominent.

As a young woman I would have been delighted to have any and all imperfections removed. As an older one I was appalled. It was as though he was saying that he could erase my childhood, disappear my past.

Our notions of beauty when we are girls are often generic, built of Barbie dolls and airbrushed photographs. Knowledge and strength are beauty to me now, not the latest ingenue as blank as a piece of paper. I have the face of a person who knows things, a face that is a novel, not a Tweet.

When the great American feminist Gloria Steinem was told she didn’t look 40, she famously replied ‘this is what 40 looks like’ – and now says the same about 80. Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren: they are beautiful because their faces have stories to tell. So do I. Many of them I wear.

First published in the May issue of Harper’s Bazaar U.S.

Anna Quindlen’s eighth novel, Miller’s Valley (Scribner), is out this autumn