Women’s ambivalent relationship to beauty is the primary subject of Taddeo’s third book-length work, Ghost Lover, a collection of short stories that insist that beauty matters, regardless of what people say to women about worrying about more serious things. But during the climb, of course, there is also the fear of losing. At the top of the pyramid is the satisfaction of winning. Most of all, though, what the most beautiful women are awarded, by men and by each other, is the imprecise prize of being hotter than someone else. The pyramid of power at those clubs is organized in those terms: at the top are models, who are followed by “near-models who have not made it yet,” who are followed by the bar’s bottle girls, who are followed by the clubbing girls who “aren’t beautiful but they’re young enough and pretty enough.” The rewards of scaling the beauty pyramid, Taddeo gradually made clear, include some tangible ones, like paid airfare to locales with more bottle-service clubs (for those who are “pretty enough,” the locales get fancier).

If the asker is a beautiful woman, then I suspect she still has questions, such as “what would it be like to be an even more beautiful woman?” More than a decade ago, in New York magazine, Lisa Taddeo surveyed the taxonomy of women at bottle-service clubs, all of whom are beautiful, but some of whom are more beautiful than others.

I’M CERTAIN THAT many people have asked themselves what it would be like to be a beautiful woman.

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