Following the closing of the Silicon Valley Moms Group site, and the resultant closing of its Book Club, I have joined a new blogging book club entitled From Left to Write. The idea of From Left to Write is not to write a book review per se but rather a post in which the blogger connects that month’s book to an anecdote or experience from his or her own life. July’s book club book is If You Knew Suzy by Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Rosman.
I don’t know about you, but I love clothes. Really. I love them. When I was a teenager, I realized that my mother — who is by no means uninterested in clothes – would rather buy something for the house, like, say an antique sconce, than buy clothes. I thought to myself, “Ah, that must be what it means to be a grown up.” Not quite. All that means is that my mom loves to decorate and I love fashion. Before a plane trip, she buys shelter magazines and I buy fashion magazines. And at 36, I would rather buy clothes than something for my house any day of the week. That may be why my living room contains a grand piano and a Thomas the Tank Engine train table and not much more, yet I have four pairs of embellished wedge sandals.
I wrote in another forum about how it has become even more important for me to dress nicely now that I am stay-at-home mom and no longer part of a professional workplace. In that piece, I explained that dressing nicely and wearing make-up reminds me that I am an adult with a graduate degree and opinions on the latest Supreme Court opinion, even if I do spend my days satisfying the whims of young children. Obviously, our clothes are the way we tell the world who we are. Are you a punk rocker? A skateboarder? A downtown hipster? A bohemian flower child? When our identity is in flux, or we are uncomfortable with a newly acquired identity, our clothes can be a way to cling to the familiar.
The famous Coach beach tote
And then there are times when our clothes take on an outsized importance. Your wedding. Your ex’s wedding. The big job interview. I think in these situations, we focus on what to wear because 1) it is too scary to focus on what the occasion really means and 2) at least our outfit is something we can control. I remember one such instance, shortly before I got married. I saw a picture in a fashion magazine of a Coach tote bag that was made out of woven wicker with red leather trim and handles. The magazine declared the tote one of the “it” bags of the summer, perfect for a beach getaway. I mean, everyone in the Hamptons was carrying one. Well, plainly, I could not leave for my Hawaiian honeymoon without the tote. (And normally I don’t even like Coach.) The next day, I was at the Coach boutique the minute it opened. Naturally, the boutique was sold out of the must-have tote, as was every other Coach store in Chicago. For some insane reason, I could not take no for an answer and I launched a no-holds-barred campaign to track down the bag. I finally found a store in some far-flung, land-locked state that still had one of the totes for sale and I paid to have it shipped to me in time for me to take it on my honeymoon. As I had hoped, I was the picture of beach chic at the Four Seasons Maui as I walked to the pool in my gauzy cover-up carring my woven Coach tote. And the bag, which is completely impractical for everyday life, has been languishing in my closet ever since.
I am pretty sure that the search for the must-have tote in the already hectic days before my wedding was not actually about the bag. Was it about nerves? Or my inability to control the weather for my outdoor wedding? Who knows. But I was reminded of how obsessively I searched for the bag — the one that everyone said was ”impossible” to find — when I read about Katherine Rosman’s mother’s obsession with an oversize Prada watch that was all the rage in the spring of 2005, when Rosman’s mother, Suzy Rosin, lay dying of lung cancer.
Suzy was, like me, someone who loved fashion. (As the wife of a successful Michigan businessman, Suzy was able to afford to buy the kind of designer duds that I sigh over in the pages of my glossy fashion magazines.) All of her life, clothes mattered a lot to Suzy. In the 80′s, Suzy frequented a tony suburban Detroit boutique that brought European designers like Armani, Sonia Rykiel and Yves St. Laurent to the Midwest. Later in her life, Suzy — who had the figure of the Pilates instructor that she was – became taken with the minimalist looks of Jil Sander and Japanese designers. But Rosman explains how her mother’s passion for shopping took a dark turn, as Suzy became sicker and weaker. Suzy’s acquisitions in her final months – a gunmetal grey quilted Chanel purse, a sleek Michael Kors dress in black jersey, the oversize Prada watch – were symbols of wellness, of her previous life as a healthy person, and were an increasingly desperate attempt to exert some measure of control over a life that was rapidly spinning out of control.
Rosman writes about how, now that her mother is gone, she often wears some of her mother’s best pieces — a Jil Sander dress, a Comme des Garçons suit — when she has an important meeting at her paper or when she just needs to channel some of her mother’s sophistication and confidence. Putting on her mother’s clothes not only makes Rosman feel closer to her mom, it also enables her to “put on” those parts of her mother’s personality that she most admired. If fashion can do all that, no wonder I love it so much.
A “From Left to Write” Book Club post. In conjunction with the book club, I received a free copy of If You Knew Suzy: A Mother, A Daughter and a Reporter’s Notebook by Katherine Rosman. If You Knew Suzy is Rosman’s story of her attempt to deal with her mother’s untimely death from lung cancer at the age of sixty by interviewing people who knew her mother at many different stages of her life. Find links to other bloggers’ reactions to the book here.
Can’t wait to start reading! And yes, yes, yes on the dressing decently EVEN when you’re staying at home. I work part-time, and it took me 3 years to realize that I could look decent outside the office. In a clothes purge last year, I got rid of all but my favorite yoga clothes, a couple of pairs of sweats – for bed and painting only!, and a couple of t-shirts. I feel so much more coordinated now when I’m with my kids. But maybe I too am just seeking a little more control!
They say to dress for the job you want to have, right? The job I want to have is glamorous, elegant stay-at-home mom!
I never thought of joining a an online book club. I just moved to a new city and left behind my teacher book club. I totally have check it out. Thanks so much, I am so glad that I was able to stop over from SITS!
Thanks for stopping by, Mary Catherine. YOu should check out From Left to Write — she may be accepting new members.
I love that you used the shopping as your connection to the book. I often shopped with my own grandmother on the same streets that Suzy shopped, in downtown Birmingham. It was a great shopping street!!
So glad that the book club continued!
Cara, I actually had very strong personal feelings about the book because a close family member of mine just underwent treatment for cancer — with a good outcome, thank goodness — but I knew that the family member in question would NOT want me to talk about that in this forum, so I had to find another way into the story.
So glad that your family member had a good outcome!
I LOVE your post! I am not a big fashionista, but I resonated with those passages of the book too about the clothes and the handbags and the Prada incident. There are certain items in my wardrobe that I have no idea why I bought, but at the time I had to have them! And there are things in my mother’s wardrobe that I will always connect with her. (Not super fashionable, but a turtleneck IS my mother and I feel like I am channeling her energy whenever I wear one!)
Thanks, Linsey. My mother is a big turtleneck-wearer as well. She has a habit of coming down to breakfast in one outfit, like a turtleneck and jeans, before showering and changing into her “real” outfit of the day.
As I said to Cara Mamma above, I needed a way into this book that was not as much about cancer and losing a parent because one of my parents recently had a bout with cancer, but I knew that parent would NOT want me to write about that. So, I focused on the clothes. It’s one of the things I do best.
I love how you connect fashion to emotion…as so many women do, as I do, as my mom did. “Things” (certainly, must-have wicker beach totes) can carry our sadness, anxiety, insecurity, happiness. They can become proxies in ways that are sometimes difficult to completely articulate.
In the upcoming NYT book review, my book gets trashed (as does my mom) for being materialistic. There is something really unsophisticated and clueless (if not sexist) about a man (in this case) calling a woman’s focus on clothes materialist. Sometimes, the outward symbols reflect the inner-life. As I wrote in the book , things left behind by someone we love can “become markers of a life once lived, like a Swiss Army knife inscription on a wooden rafter: Mom Was Here.”
The New York Times! Who reads that scurrilous rag anyway?
All joking aside, I’m sorry about the negative review. I personally found your book to be incredibly candid and intimate, and so naturally, you focused on some of the “little” things in life, such as getting your nails done, but it was in the context of your attempt to deal with some of the “biggest” questions in life: what is the measure of a good life? What does it mean to know someone? To love someone? How do we cope with the inevitable loss of loved ones? As I read it, the book was not about clothes and manicures and exercise, but in the course of writing about your mother’s rich and complicated life on such a intimate scale, those are things that naturally come up.
What does materialistic mean anyway? To care for things more than people? I can’t imagine anyone accusing your mother of that. She obviously cared very deeply for those around her. People are more important than things, but to pretend that things do not matter is absurd. The New York Times covers the fashion industry pretty religiously, does it not?
Another point: it can be difficult when privileged people such as you, and me and your mom experience tragedy because we were so lucky in so many ways before the tragedy struck. Does that mean that our tragedy is somehow less? Or that we were somehow due for tragedy? I don’t think so, but it can make easier for others to minimize the tragedy. But that is simply not fair. Your mom deserved to spend more than sixty years on this earth and she deserved to meet your children. You deserved that as well. And the fact that you were denied those experiences is an injustice.
In response to both Emily’s post and Katie’s comment: I am disabled and not working and funds are low because of it. I am not a materialistic person by any means, but I can tell you I miss my “work” clothes, or the pretty clothes that I can no longer afford. I no longer have a purpose for those clothes, but I miss what they represented in my life and how they made me feel. Surely there is nothing wrong with that, nor how Emily feels about what fashion means to her or what it represents to Katie or her mom!
No one has the right to judge anyone unless you have walked a mile in their Manolo Blaniks!
Very well said, Emily!
I like the Coach bag and your reference to the gauzy cover-up makes me think of the ‘Girl from Ipanema.’
I love this blog and will now read it all the time.
I would be honored to have you as a regular reader, Katie. You know, we actually have some friends in common.
I thought we probably would. Throw out some names!
Jodi and Ron?