Thank you so much

I wanted to write a quick note to thank everyone who has supported me with donations, calls, emails, and prayers during this terrible time. Thank you especially to Sister Wolf and Wendy Brandes, who coordinated the effort to raise money as soon as they heard about my husband's death. I'm just amazed and humbled by the kindness and generosity of my Internet friends, most of whom I've never met in person. Eventually I will thank each one of you individually, but for now just know that it has been a tremendous help and comfort. I really really appreciate it.

Thank you,
Janet

Best Books of 2009

So every year I keep a list of the books I read. It's a compulsion for me, both the reading and the list-keeping. I'm never without a stack of books next to the bed, and finish about three a month, discarding twice as many half-read. Life is short! I have no time to waste reading bad books. This is my highly subjective list of the best of the past year:

Fiction:

The Graveyard Book-Neil Gaiman
A kids' book, really, but well worth reading. It's the story of a boy whose parents are murdered (no spoiler; it happens on the first page), and he's raised in a graveyard by a group of kindhearted ghosts and other characters. Scary and suspenseful and well-written, it kept my kids and me looking forward to bedtime so we could get back to it.

American Wife-Curtis Sittenfeld
I would never have guessed that a book could make me feel any sort of sympathy towards George W. Bush, but this novelized account of his marriage from Laura Bush's perspective made me think for a moment that perhaps he wasn't inherently evil, just incompetent and overwhelmed. Thankfully, the moment passed.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?-Lorrie Moore
After picking this up, I'm dying to read her latest The Gate at the Stairs. Set partly in Paris where the narrator is observing the dissolution of her marriage, with flashbacks to her adolescence in a small Adirondack town. Just a fantastic, fantastic writer of fiction.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanesi-Geoff Dyer
Another favorite writer, Geoff Dyer's mash-up of fiction and non- reads like part travel guide (setting: Venice and India), part memoir, and is packed with cultural and philosophical insights minus the pretension you might expect from this description.

Nonfiction:

An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination-Elizabeth McCracken
Not my usual thing, this wrenching memoir of a stillborn baby was so well told that I read it anyway.

The Lost City of Z-David Grann
Combining the story of a great Victorian-era explorer with his own hapless modern-day quest for the elusive City of Z, New Yorker writer David Grann provides many compelling reasons never to visit the Amazon. Great reading; wouldn't want to be there.

The Sisters Antipodes-Jane Alison
I know the memoir genre is stuffed to bursting right now, but Jane Alison's tale of her parents' divorce and subsequent remarriage to the couple who were once their best friends is brilliantly told. She explores the relationship between herself and her counterpart "sister" (the daughter of the other couple), and how trading fathers effects each of them differently.

The End of Overeating-David Kessler
A disturbing look at the commercial food industry and how it works to encourage the consumption of the least healthy foods, and contributes to the obesity epidemic.

Lost in the Meritocracy-Walter Kirn
Walter Kirn's account of his high-achieving youth and acceptance to Princeton, where he managed to learn almost nothing, and suffered a breakdown. Anyone who's ever felt like a fraud will relate to this book.

Born Round, the Secret History of a Full-Time Eater-Frank Bruni
The former New York Times restaurant critic details his childhood bouts of compulsive eating and bulimia, his coming out as a gay man, and how spending a couple of years in Italy helped him to get his eating under control before he was put to the ultimate test as a food critic required to dine out 6 nights a week.

Lit-Mary Karr
The master of the memoir, Mary Karr is always funny and blunt and writes about painful stuff with such a lack of self-pity that you can't help but adore her even when she's the one being an asshole. This, her third memoir, deals with her own alcoholism and divorce, and unexpected conversion to Catholicism. This book made all the year-end best lists, and I have to concur.

Iris Apfel

I have been a fan of the inimitable Iris Apfel since I first saw her in Bill Cunningham's photo montages for the Sunday New York Times. She and her husband Carl founded textile company Old World Weavers about 50 years ago, and she's been a fashion icon and fixture at shows for almost as long. So I was thrilled when I heard that a collection of her clothing, featured in the book "Rare Bird of Fashion", would be coming to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, where I take my kids so frequently that we have a membership. I got tickets to attend a talk with Iris and Isaac Mizrahi in November, and then impulsively decided to go to Paris during that week, so I ended up giving the tickets to my mom and sister. But when I heard she'd be back in December for a conversation with Michael Vollbracht (formerly of Bill Blass), followed by a fashion show inspired by Iris' style, I was determined to attend.

I dragged my husband, who may have been the only non-gay man in attendance. The show itself was staged beautifully, with 5 rooms divided by theme, and dozens of mannequins wearing Iris' ensembles. Apfel is known for her ability to mix haute couture clothes with flea market and ethnic jewelry, but I must say I was most impressed by the (literal) weight of the stuff she wears. Some of her necklaces and cuffs must weigh 20 lbs!

Iris was witty and down-to-earth, despite a moderator who insisted on reading her questions awkwardly from a sheaf of paper and couldn't seem to get beyond clichés. Whether she was just nervous or really didn't know how to have a conversation was unclear, but Iris and Michael carried on, unphased. When the moderator asked Iris about her strategy for putting together an outfit, Iris replied, "There's no strategy! I just wear what looks good!" She and Michael Vollbracht were refreshingly unpretentious, as evidenced by his answer to the question most commonly asked of designers: Where does your inspiration come from? Vollbracht deadpanned: Money!

During the intermission, I threw myself into Iris' path and gushed like the nerdy fashion groupie that I am. She graciously tolerated me for several minutes and allowed my husband to take a picture.

Unfortunately the fashion show that followed was embarrassingly amateur, featuring a belly dancer, a baton twirler (really!), and a dozen "models" stomping down the runway to Lady Gaga and doing their best Blue Steel faces. The crowd that attended was far more interesting, ranging from fashion students in their avant garde best to elderly patrons of the museum who seemed to have wandered in from a yacht club event. One such couple looked so amazing, he in some sort of admiral's jacket with a red sash across the front, she in an evening gown with hair that looked like it had been whipped into a stiff peak, in a shade of faded apricot. The hair defied gravity and fell somewhere between Marge Simpson and Cindy Lou Who. It was magnificent and threatened to upstage Iris herself.

photos from Bill Cunningham, 2005

This is how an 88-year old woman wears leather pants.

With the New York Times' Bill Cunningham

Iris with Lyn Yaeger

Daul Kim

Paris-based Korean model and blogger Daul Kim is dead of an apparent suicide. I've read her blog, I Like To Fork Myself, a dark and funny stream-of-consciousness rumination on life, modeling and 80's music, for the past couple of years. Signs of depression and despair were there, and it's a shame she didn't get the help she needed. One entry from 2007 read:

and thanks to stupid tv show from korea ppl think i like to
torture myself and thanks to that im getting lots and lots of
suicide emails on a daily basis
but im definately not depressed, and i dont want to killmyself

i wish you all feel good about yourself and just think happy
and listen to 80's music and smile and 'dance-walk' like boy george.

AND PLEASE dont kill me.....cos i dont reply ur emails cos
i dont want to die.....

As with the suicide of Russian model Ruslana Korshunova last year, much of the blog chatter has focussed on what problems a gorgeous young model could possibly have. It's always shocking when someone so young and full of promise chooses to end her life, and it's interesting that we so easily assume that beauty confers a certain immunity from depression.

misc

So I'm having a bit of a mid-life crisis at the moment. Not a serious shave-my-head-and-move-to-India kind of crisis, but more of an existential discomfort. Whether it's due to coming home from Paris and finding the same problems I left waiting for me, or my impending 40th birthday, I don't know.

I'm spending most of the time I'm not looking at fashion blogs or eating cake ruminating on my future, and what I should do with it. Grad school? New career? (well, my old career was in book publishing many moons ago, so I don't have much of a choice about that.) What to do? Where to live? How to live? It's all very confusing and makes my head hurt. For now I'm just guzzling coffee and contemplating my options, but I'd welcome any suggestions no matter how ridiculous.


In other matters, I'm unloading more stuff on eBay: watches, jeans, sunglasses, etc. Check it out.

Also, stop by and say hello to the kids. Comments thrill them.

Here they are, right before we were kicked out of Colette for taking this picture.

Paris with kids

So we just returned from a fantastic, impulsive and financially irresponsible two weeks in Paris. I justified the expense by selling some stuff on eBay that covered our supercheap airfare, and renting an apartment from our friend Isabelle at a great rate. We probably spent more money on pastry and Diet Coke (the one negating the other) than anything else except maybe Kinder Eggs, which I used to bribe my 7 and 9 year old to spend more time in the Louvre.

My daughter Coco and I spent a day in the fancy shops, where the Chanel staff hovered politely but nervously as she fondled a $25,000 coat, and we got to witness a fitting in Lanvin's atelier. We spotted Emmanuele Alt in Colette, but played it cool and didn't take her photo. I can report that over the knee boots are indeed all the rage in Paris, and that French women do occasionally get fat, although not on the scale of Americans. Bafflingly, McDonalds and Starbucks (which are on every corner) are constantly mobbed, and not just by tourists.

We uncovered the truth about overpriced tourist magnet Angelina's, when we walked by just after closing one night to see the dining room empty but with the lights still on. My daughter said, "Hey I saw something run by in there," and when we paused at the window to watch for a few minutes we saw no fewer than two dozen mice come out of hiding to nibble macaroon crumbs from the floor! Blech. Have your $10 hot chocolate somewhere else.

Despite my best attempts I haven't managed to live in Paris yet, but have been fortunate enough to find myself there every few years for the last couple of decades, and it's been interesting to observe the place as an outsider. Like any major tourist spot, the locals both depend on and resent the invaders, creating a strained politeness that sometimes cracks.

Unlike the Italians, the French do not fall all over themselves for kids. When in Rome, no matter how fancy the restaurant, our two kids were always welcomed, fussed over, given tours of the kitchen and free desserts. Not so in Paris. When my daughter ordered escargots in one restaurant, the waiter made no move to help as she struggled with the snail-removal utensil. If you want a menu pour les enfants, go to McDo. Of course travel with kids is distinctly different than travel without, despite all our assertions to the contrary before we actually had the little darlings. I spoke with the authority of the childless when I assured our friends and family that our lifestyle of spontaneous trips and dining out would not change one iota with the addition of kids (insert laughter from parents here). At the risk of sounding corny, however, I have to say that I enjoy seeing the world with my kids, and would rather travel with them than without. For instance, I would never have seen this:

If you want to know where you can find a pig with one head and two bodies reenacting Munch's "The Scream", it's in the Paleontology Museum at the Jardin des Plantes. You're welcome.

And I definitely wouldn't have taken a tour of les egouts, the Paris sewer, which, despite the presence of a young couple making out down there, is every bit as romantic as it sounds. I could taste it for several hours afterward and required two macaroons, a violette, and half a baguette to erase the horrid memory.

Without the kids, I might have failed to notice some of the art at the Pompidou, a veritable treasure trove of stuff requiring uncomfortable explanations to the under-12 set. In addition to the the Nan Goldin photo exhibit, the piece that consisted of a woman wearing a dress made entirely of meat, and the video installation of a naked woman hula hooping with a barbed wire hoop, the kids were fascinated by this

They were underwhelmed by the Van Goghs of the Musée D'Orsay

but this chair made quite an impression

What is that lady doing?

The kids were required to write a journal entry a day since they were missing two weeks of school, and my husband and I enjoyed reading them at night. One day my son wrote, "Today we went to the Louvre. It had lots of art. Most of it was naked." That about sums it up, doesn't it?

We visited the Musée de la Poupee (doll museum), the Museum of Magic and Automatons, climbed the 486 steps to the top of Notre Dame to see the gargoyles up close, and trekked out to the 19th arrondissement to the Parc de la Villette. We visited the pet stores on the Quai de la Messegerie, which carry not only the usual dogs and cats, but chinchillas, pigeons, roosters, and hairless rats, sometimes all in the same cage.

Is there something on my back?

chipmunks for sale. Only 50 Euros!

We loved the taxidermy at Deyrolle, and spent an hour or so looking through the drawers and drawers of exotic insects and butterflies.

But after two weeks of $8 cups of coffee and speaking broken French, we were ready to come home to our cat and our American TV channels and our full-size fridge. Now it's nearly 7:30 pm, and I'm off to bed. Bonne nuit!

Books books books

the view from here

Books are my security blanket. When I found myself at the doctor's office today without my own reading material, I nearly panicked. Sticky back issues of Arthritis Digest did not appeal. I almost never travel without at least a magazine shoved in my bag; the New Yorker is nice and slim for this purpose, but I've been known to heft a big fat September Vogue into Boston to occupy my two hour round trip.

I shudder to estimate that about $2000 of the cost of our most recent move can be attributed to books, 30 or so boxes of them. Silly, maybe, in the age of Kindle and the Internet, when everything's available at the touch of a button, to continue to shlep around heavy piles of actual books, but there's something reassuring about the tactile sensation of turning pages, the thick glossy stock of art books, a well-thumbed paperback with page corners turned down to mark a particularly wonderful passage. And I can't see reading to my kids in bed with a Kindle. They need to scan their shelves, book spines committed to memory before they could read, to select exactly what they are in the mood for on any given night. I suppose that just as printed newpapers seem to be headed for extinction, and the iPod has become an accepted substitute for a shelf full of albums, the electronic book may replace the library. But I hope not.

above three photos from Desire to Inspire

currently on my nightstand