Crying at Loehmann’s

Notes on writing, life, jackets, and more

The other day, a friend told me how much she was enjoying Wordy Bird, which made me feel like a million bucks. Writing is a performance. Obviously, it’s possible to write for yourself, with no intention of every sharing it with a reader, but writing for publication is about completing a circuit of thought, a transference of the contents of the writer’s brain to the reader’s. The process isn’t complete until that transference occurs. If it occurs and the recipient feels satisfied, you’ve succeeded. Otherwise, you’re just singing in the shower.

I’m very attuned to this performative aspect of writing, and maybe one of my strengths is that I’m good at gauging how something I’ve written will fall on the reader’s ear. That’s not the same as saying I know how to write as much as it is saying I am able to read what I’ve written as a reader might, which is not easy to do. It’s like tickling yourself. But somehow, I’m good at positioning myself as a reader stumbling onto my stories. I always read them as if I were someone who is deeply skeptical and impatient: Why should I read this? Why is this interesting? Where is this going? It spurs me to write as hard as I can, because I role-play a reader who is a little annoyed that they got distracted by this piece of writing, and is huffily insisting that the writing justify itself.

One outcome of being attuned to the performance aspect of writing is that I really enjoy doing readings. I like seeing if what I’ve written stands up when it’s coming to you through the air rather on the page. Even more, I love the real-time feedback from listeners, getting laughs where I planted jokes, feeling people rising and falling with the topography of the story. I read my stories out loud as I work on them, so I’m used to hearing them aloud and I often make adjustments to help them work better when read out loud. I’ve done the narration for all of my audiobooks except The Orchid Thief, which was recorded back when audiobooks were a rarity and authors were not usually asked to do the narration. It’s a lot of work to narrate an audiobook, but I love doing it. The other day I met someone for the first time, and after we were introduced he looked at me with the strangest expression. Finally, he said he’d been listening to one of my audiobooks for the last few weeks and he felt like my voice was in his head, and he found it disconcerting to hear it coming out of my mouth.

When I first started writing for big national magazines I felt a little lost. When I wrote for a small newspaper in relatively small Portland, Oregon, I felt like I knew my readers—they were the people in the grocery store checkout line, and my neighbors, and my dogsitter. I could picture my readers as I wrote because I actually knew them. Making the move to big magazines was my dream, definitely, and in most ways it was great, but I was then writing into a faceless void: I had many more readers but they were far-flung and harder to picture. It took me a while to feel the same intimate connection to them—to have a sense of who I was talking to, into whom I was downloading my brain, sharing my stories.

When I first moved to New York, a friend introduced me to the wonders of shopping at Loehmann’s, in the Bronx. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Loehmann’s was a discount store that had a lot of overstock and discontinued items, and a lot of it was junk, but off in a side room, there was a section for designer clothing that was a gold mine. My friend taught me how to blaze through the section (close your eyes, run your hands over the clothes, stop only when you feel fine material, then pull it off the rack and take a look). I got some beautiful things there. The other women shopping in the section were as dogged as I was, as avid and focused as snipers. On the benches at the entrance to the store, two or three or five miserable-looking men were always waiting, hunched and abject. It always felt like a cautionary sign to me—that the mad pursuit of clothing to make you look good was being done at the expense of people who might be exactly who you wanted to look good for. Of course you should dress for yourself—of course—but if any part of it is meant to communicate to, say, your partner or spouse something about your attractiveness and creativity, you have failed a little if it begins without acknowledging that communication. To be honest, I always took that revelation at Loehmann’s as a lesson about writing and how it always should be in conversation with a reader, even when you don’t think they’re looking.

SHOW NOTES

—I keep meaning to tell you about my friend Carol Young, who is the founder and designer of Carol Young Undesigned, a wonderful store and line of clothing based in Los Angeles. I met the store before I met Carol (just so you know my enthusiasm for her designs came first, and then I discovered that she is a delightful person whom I now consider a friend). I love her aesthetic, wear her stuff constantly, and one pair of her trousers called the Hepburn actually make me (5’2) look leggy. I wore one of the tops I got from her so often that the material finally lost its will to live. I offer this testimony without promise of favor, Your Honor.

—I’m in London, and while walking down the street yesterday, I passed a tailor shop—an old-fashioned one where they make suits to measure. In the window I saw the coolest thing:

Obviously, this is a demo of the guts of a suit jacket, but my husband and I gaped at it and thought: This is the coolest jacket EVER and I want it just as it is, unfinished, with some of the lining showing and the basting and all the mechanics laid bare. I went into the shop and asked the nice man working there if I could get the jacket, and if the sample wasn’t available, if he could make one for me just like it. He was puzzled, and I repeated my request a few times, explaining how much I loved the way it looked. “Madame, it is not finished,” he said. He looked almost wounded, as if I were insulting his skill as a tailor. I said that I understood that it was only half-made, but that is just how I wanted it. “I cannot sell it like this,” he insisted, “because it is not finished.” I know, I repeated, but could he just kind of roll with my weird request? He was adamant, and I walked out empty-handed and broken-hearted.