Hello Beautiful: The Beauty in Hurt, Anger, Sadness, and Family

As someone who sees novels as a way to distance myself from the chaos of the outside world, books that are intended to make you feel in depths you never could have imagined are normally not at the top of my list. However, every once in a while, such a book comes along to make me second-guess this idea and think about how even escaping has to exist in some reality. Hello Beautiful, by Ann Napolitano, is a novel that made me cry, laugh, and yearn in ways no other book has. Following the lives of four sisters born in Pilsen, this novel is an ode to family and finding the beautiful in everything, no matter how much it might hurt at first.

Hello Beautiful opens with a chapter from the point of view of the eldest Padavano sister, Julia. Seeing as she is as type-A as one can be, I instantly found myself in her strict routines and desire for her future to unfold in the way she had planned it. Although her insistent need to control her life and those around her, I feel a deep sense of empathy that comes with visualizing myself as I read Napolitano’s honest dialogue. Sylvie is the sister I wish I was. Characterized as bookish, kind, hardworking, non-confrontational, and devoted to her family beyond words, Sylvie is arguably the most fleshed-out character in the novel. While we might not agree with every decision she makes, such as marrying her sister’s ex-husband, because she understands Sylvie to such a degree, we can come to see decisions from her perspective. This is a type of connection that I wish I had with Emeline and Cecilia, the two youngest, twin-sisters. Even though the novel is thought to follow the lives of all four sisters, our attention remains primarily on Julia and Sylvie. From what we get from Emeline and Cecilia, it is hard to form a deep opinion beyond generally enjoying them when they are a part of the plot.

Being the sole male character to receive significant pages dedicated to him and his story, my relationship to the character of William shifted dramatically as I read on. In the beginning, it is incredibly easy to write off William as needing to gain confidence and not let people push him around, to understand that he’s so “agreeable” at times because of his deep and profound fear of losing people. As a result of not wanting to be the cause of more loss, William even goes so far as to try and become “lost” for the sake of Julia and their daughter Alice, an act I didn’t fully understand until William reached his adulthood and had to deal with watching Sylvie slowly fade away. In fact, it isn’t until the last pages of the novel that we see William overcome this fear when he realizes he would be able to survive when the most important person to him, Sylvie, dies. In an unfortunate but eye-opening turn of events, William had to lose a part of himself (Sylvie) to gain a new one (Alice). In the end, one of the characters that I was most dismissive of in the beginning became the one I wanted to speak with in real life.

Hello Beautiful does its name justice as it helped me navigate my own understanding of what it means to be beautiful. In a world so consumed with physical appearance and what it means to have “style,” this novel forced me to reconsider how I define the word. Is it beautiful if my life comes out exactly as I had written down, or is the beauty in the unexpected and uncertain? Is it beautiful to distance yourself from someone because they made decisions you wouldn’t have, or is someone beautiful when they disregard personal preferences to make sure someone feels safe and loved? I won’t say that this novel gave me the answer to all these questions, but it certainly pushed me to consider them. In the end, isn’t that the point of literature: to make you think about life in ways you never had before, not just stick to what makes you comfortable.