The Weaponized Amber Tamblyn

She’s lactating on late-night TV, teaching feminism to David Cross and Quentin Tarantino, and attacking rape culture in her debut novel.

- Lisa Miller

 IN THE SUMMER of her 35th year, Amber Tamblyn is modeling female provocation. Also self-acceptance. Which is why she wants to show me the whisker on her chin. For more than half her life, Tamblyn—featured in Joan of Arcadia, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants—traded on her angsty-teen-girlishness: the super-relatable friend who might be gorgeous if she would just lose five pounds. “A Valerie Bertinelli for the new millennium,” said the Washington Post. “So appealing, and by the way so ordinary. I mean that as a compliment,” said Les Moonves. But after a couple of flops and a snub in this magazine, in which she was compared to Hilary Duff, Tamblyn realized she was on a path to nowhere and righted herself. Over the past year, she has reemerged in public, all lactating boobs and nerd glasses and potty mouth, the well-connected #MeToo warrior who maybe oxymoronically remains steadfastly married to the supercilious comedian David Cross and who in the wake of the grotesque revelations about Harvey Weinstein persuaded her old friend Quentin Tarantino to renounce him. As she hurtles toward middle age, she is giving her former patronizing critics and handlers her zaftig ass to kiss.

The chin hair is a microsymbol, then, of Tamblyn’s reawakening. She has spoken and written a lot in public about refusing to capitulate to Hollywood’s impossible standards of beauty for women, and so when we meet in a Brooklyn café near her home, I ask her for an example. Which beauty convention is she rejecting right now? “I have one hair. Here,” she says. Her fingertips travel to the lone whisker and then caress it like a fetish. At a photo shoot the previous day, “my publicist was like, ‘Please, let me pluck that!’ ” Tamblyn tells me. “And I was like, ‘No! This is how I think. I just lightly tug on this little hair. You cannot remove this hair.’ ”