A raw, beautiful memoir of a girl born missing an ear, a medical system insistent on saving her from herself, and our culture’s desire to “fix” bodies.

When Kate Gies was four years old, a plastic surgeon pressed a synthetic ear to the right side of her head and pulled out a mirror. He told her he could make her “whole”—could make her “right”—and she believed him. From the age of four to thirteen, she underwent fourteen surgeries, including skin and bone grafts, to craft the appearance of an outer ear. Many of the surgeries failed, leaving permanent damage to her body.

In short, lyrical vignettes, Kate writes about how her “disfigured” body was scrutinized, pathologized, and even weaponized. She describes the physical and psychic trauma of medical intervention and its effects on her sense of self, first as a child needing to be fixed and, later, as a teenager and adult navigating the complex expectations and dangers of being a woman.

It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished is the story of a girl desperately trying to have a body that makes her acceptable and of a woman learning to own a body she has never felt was hers to define. In an age of speaking out about the abuse of marginalized bodies, this memoir takes a hard look at the role of the medical system in body oppression and trauma.

Kate Gies is a writer and educator living in Toronto. She teaches creative nonfiction and expressive arts at George Brown College. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in The Malahat Review, The Humber Literary Review, Hobart, Minola Review, and The Conium Review. She was a finalist for the CBC Nonfiction Prize, and her essay “Foreign Bodies” (excerpted from It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished) will be included in the forthcoming Best Canadian Essays anthology from Biblioasis.

Kate Gies' profile page

“Kate Gies is an incredible writer, offering an urgent story into our body-dysmorphic times. With a light and powerful touch, Gies guides us through childhood innocence, lost slowly to a culture blinded by ideas of physical conformity and medical supremacy. It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished is a shattering, triumphant tale of reclamation. If you’ve suffered in the name of beauty, you’ll find mercy and liberation in this tender, heart-opening memoir.”
— JESSICA WAITE, bestselling author of The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards

“Kate Gies’s beautiful face is prodded and pathologized from the moment she is born. In this exquisite and harrowing memoir, she details the trauma of medical interventions endured, and the difficulty of navigating a culture fixated on superficial appearances, symmetry, and sameness. Raw, brilliant, painful, and wise, It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished explores the colossal difference between fixing and healing. There are valuable lessons here for us all.”
— KARA STANLEY, author of The Pain Project and Fallen

“An emotional journey through medicine's most barbaric practices, told in a series of snapshots torn from the author's memories. Woven together like a poetic patchwork of little traumas, Gies tells a gutting story of medicine for medicine's sake, robbed of all humanity and accountability. The author further pulls this thread, to heartbreaking effect, to illustrate how childhood medical trauma follows us throughout life, burrowing deep inside our feelings of agency and self-worth as we stumble throughout adulthood. All told, It Must Be Beautiful is a meditation on the lifelong price of beauty and so-called ‘normalness’.”
— TRACEY LINDEMAN, bestselling author of Bleed: Destroying Myths and Misogyny in Endometriosis Care

“An intimate, detailed, and heartbreaking account of unnecessary childhood medical intervention, and a must-read for medical professionals and teachers working with vulnerable children.”
— ALANA SOMERVILLE, author of Holding onto Normal