Reclaiming UGLY!

A Radically Joyful Guide to Unlearn Oppression and Uplift, Glorify, and Love Yourself

By: Vanessa Rochelle Lewis

Narrated by: Sanya Simmons

Flip the script on how you think about UGLY—what it means, what it is, and how to reclaim it to Uplift, Glorify, and Love Yourself in an uglified world.

Blending joyful self-help magic with incisive social analysis and personal narrative, Vanessa Rochelle Lewis empowers listeners to heal, connect, and revolt against uglification.

Uglification is "ugly" weaponized: a tool, ideology, and type of oppression that designates some bodies as more or less worthy of love, respect, access, and dignity. It defines who's accepted in what spaces, which identities are marginalized, and how we all move through the world—and is part and parcel of systems like white supremacy, ableism, sizeism, sexism, and queer- and transphobia. Here, Lewis takes on uglification, showing us how reclaiming UGLY is a subversive act that roars an unapologetic "yes!" to joy, healing, and community-building in a world that's engineered to hold us back.

Lewis asks us to go beyond analysis, inviting us to boldly perform UGLY as an act of rebellion, liberation, and radical self-love. Through self-help exercises, reflective meditations, and lesson plans, Lewis moves us closer to a collective liberation that takes back what society tells us is ugly and taboo...and teaches us to deconstruct what we've told ourselves is ugly and taboo. In sharing her analysis, personal journey, and activity toolkit, Lewis offers a warm embrace and compassionately guides us toward lives of radical self-acceptance, joyful community-centered healing, and unfiltered self-love.

©2024 Vanessa Rochelle Lewis (P)2024 North Atlantic Books

Critic reviews

"Healing comes only when we face the deep harms of which we have been subject and perpetrator. Reclaiming UGLY! is an invitation to heal both the internal and external wounds of uglification. With a grace born of profound empathy, Vanessa never blames us for drinking from the chalice of shame and cruelty as she knows we all have thirsted for belonging, care, and love amidst oppressive structures that have left us few options. Reclaiming UGLY! is a necessary drink of liberatory possibility; a world formed of immense beauty and transformative love; a world we each get to co create. Lucky us." —Sonya Renee Taylor, New York Times best-selling author of The Body Is Not an Apology

"With Reclaiming UGLY!, Vanessa Rochelle Lewis is offering us her hand as we look in the mirror and learn to see the beauty there, and the beauty in everyone, shirking off societal norms that deny our multitudinous, miraculous nature. Looking at the creation, maintenance, and impact of uglification through a lens that includes the personal, cultural, and factual, Vanessa shows us a way forward toward compassion and revolutionary love." —adrienne maree brown, New York Times best-selling author of Pleasure Activism

"The wisdom of this book is borne of a deeply personal story told with such clarity and love that we are thankfully implicated and freed by it all at the same time. Vanessa’s writing is a mirror where each page rescues a bit more of our reflections from the lies and dangers of lookism. The framework here is ultimately one that teaches us how to recover what in us has been made out as ugly by this society, to interrupt the harm to each other we perpetuate in its name, and how, ultimately, we reclaim an ethic of care, deep honor, and protection. Vanessa has given us a generous, liberating provocation and invitation with Reclaiming UGLY! that we would do ourselves a service to receive." —Prentis Hemphill, author, therapist, founder of The Embodiment Institute, and host of the podcast Finding Our Way

Inspirational

Easy to read and full of many thought-provoking pearls of wisdom and knowledge. As a clinical psychotherapist and educator, I will recommend this book to my clients and as talking points in the classroom.

Medicine & magic to set us free

This is powerful storytelling, a compelling personal and social history of uglification melded with loving, healing wisdom to transform ourselves and our world. While uglification kills and oppresses, the ideas laid out in Reclaiming UGLY are life-giving medicine and magic that can set us free. Loved the narration too — a must read / listen!