In On Beauty Susan Johnson explores the role of beauty in our lives, and in her life in particular: ''Sometimes I think my whole life has been one long search for beauty. I am Australian and as such I should be embarrassed to write a line like that, in a land where one must speak of beauty in whispers.'' She writes of where her search has taken her, how ''beauty enters the body like desire'', and how beauty is nothing less than ''life''s call to order, life''s bid to save it from itself''.