She felt peace with accepting that she may never be awarded for her beauty or personality but she was content realizing that she is beautiful in her own unique way. She is trying to explain that she doesn't want to be like those blonde girls but she wants to feel as beautiful and as glorified as America sees white, tall, blonde, skinny girls. But after I kept reading she goes on and says that she to is a blank Haitian young woman. Because Gay talks about being beautiful, she takes away the beauty of being unique and different as Miss America was. The contrast with the trade and the girls from the book almost make it seem like it is not right for an African-American woman to be a figure of beauty. All of Gays dreams sound a little shallow because her dream is to be popular and admired for her beauty. They have all the features that society says is right to have. The way she describes these girls is generic. I get a feeling that Gay struggled with a lot of self image and self love issues. She basically worships them and makes it seem like you have to be all those things in order to be happy. My first reaction is how Gay describes the two girls from the book. She characterizes herself as any other girl, and points out that any girl can be a Sweet Valley girl. Overall, I think the story was a touching narrative on how Gay did not limit herself to just her race even though the people around her and even the stories she read did.
It also seems interesting that Gay almost insinuates that she knows the story better when she says "you think Pascal has no idea who the Wakefield twins are." It hones in on a feeling we have all had when we deeply loved characters in a series and felt that the author was not doing them justice. It was humorous to hear Gay comment on the quality of the writing as she grew older and reread the series I feel like we have all gone back and read books from our tween years and realize how poorly written they were. I thought it was interesting how most of the narrative lives in this town of Sweet Valley, mirroring the fact that she spent most of her life enraptured in these Sweet Valley books. We still know that there are huge issues with race in the country today, all of them quite tense, so it was an interesting twist to hear about her experience in a more relaxed setting. Gay's short story told the truth about the blonde, white, and thin hierarchy of popular kids in grade school, but I think this truth extends past school and into the world. She definitely comments on the race issue at the time and the idea that a black girl could not be popular simply because she was black. However, I think I enjoyed the personal narrative more. I did, of course assume that the piece would be about Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America. This piece captured my interest from the start.