Your Basic Boho Bitch

27 Dresses? I own way more than 27 dresses. What am I, a farmer?

I spent eight days in New Orleans last month, primarily because I wanted to hunker down with my manuscript,¹ WHICH I TURNED IN YESTERDAY, SUCKERS. But one can write/revise only so many hours, so I went out or had people over every day.² The weather was uncannily beautiful for most of my time there and I started taking selfies in my inexplicably flattering powder room³. Over the course of seven full days, I wore eight sundresses and inflicted daily selfies on social media (Bluesky). No apologies.

Eight dresses I wore, one I did not.

I‘ve been threatening to start a mid-month addition to this newsletter in which I tell the story behind a particular outfit, but a) the first one I wrote was so sad it made me cry⁴ and b) I’m not sure I have that many wardrobe stories to tell. Besides, I’m not a fashionista, a person with elevated tastes. My teenager is the one who dreams of Vivienne Westwood and Maison Margiela Tabi shoes, who once gathered all the Vogue magazines in our house and put them in (my) bed with her “because I was sick and it made me feel better, being surrounded by Vogue.” Me? I’m a basic boho bitch, even if I’m the one paying for the Vogue subscription. My favorite brand turns out to be owned by people with not-great politics, a fact I’m struggling with.

Still, clothes bring me joy. Finally. I wasted so much of my life thinking that I didn’t deserve beautiful clothes because I wasn’t disciplined enough to torture my body into being a size/shape it was never meant to be. I wouldn’t tell this story if my mother was still alive, but when I was in college, she told me that I would never be a size 10⁵, and this was meant as a dire prophecy, some serious Oracle of Delphi shit. Your son will kill you, then marry your wife, and, oh, you will never be skinny.

My mother, who was naturally thin, was committed to thinness as an almost moral imperative. Ditto, my sister, who learned the hard way that the only way a woman in our family could achieve a flat stomach was by embracing anorexia. As it happens, I have been more or less a size 10 for much of my adult life and on the rare occasions when I dieted my way to a smaller size, I was miserable and my face hollowed out in a most unattractive way. I gave up dieting in 2018 and I have remained the same size, if not exactly the same shape. Things may shift during the journey, in life as well as a plane’s overhead compartments.

Anyway, until 2020, my closet tended to be a dark, somber place. Lots of blacks, grays and whites, the occasional pop of red. Then two things happened within five weeks — my marriage ended and a pandemic began. And I found that one way of coping with all the uncertainty was to get up every day and put on nice clothes. I was literally all dressed up with no place to go.

I work from home and I work out A LOT.⁶ It would make sense for me to live in leggings and T-shirts. But even now, more than six years after I first started using my clothes as a kind of sartorial anti-depressant, it’s a rare day that I don’t put on a capital O-outfit. Usually a dress, preferably a dress with pockets, often paired with wedges or boots, earrings, maybe a bracelet. They say that women disappear as they age and there’s a lot of truth to that.⁷ But I’ve noticed that my clothing choices make me more visible on the streets of Baltimore and New Orleans. Especially the latter for some reason. It’s gotten to the point where I seldom take a walk in New Orleans without someone commenting favorably on what I’m wearing.⁸

Yes, I made a file called “27 Dresses” and it has 40 images in it — so far.

I’ve said/written this before, but it bears repeating: I believe that one of the most subversive things an old woman can do is like the way she looks. Actually, it’s subversive at any age. Yes, I know I’m a dead-ringer for Sweet Polly Purebred⁹ and I could enumerate my many “flaws” — but I won’t. There are always others who are willing to do that for me, usually men. A man on social media once complained about an outfit that showed off my legs, said I was far too old for certain hemlines.

I beg to differ.

Yeah, I’m just being obnoxious now. But, c’mon, look at the “cuts” in the middle photo.

Selfies are, inevitably, self-centric. Egotistical, vain. Yet my not-so-little gallery also is a treasure trove of memories. My daughter’s bat mitzvah, my stepson’s wedding, a dance party with my mom friends, Mother’s Day 2025, the premiere of Lady in the Lake, pub date for Murder Takes a Vacation, a solo movie excursion, a wedding I conducted, a pun I concocted in hopes of tickling Benjamin Dreyer.¹⁰

The primary thing I notice about my recent New Orleans photos is that I’m happy.¹¹ I think a lot about a selfie I took in a Dallas hotel bathroom in 2019, back when I simply could not face the fact that my marriage was dying. I was wearing a Brochu Walker sweater, shockingly chic Athleta trousers, an Ippolita medallion that my daughter now wears every day, and a pair of black Dinosaur Design hoop earrings that I still mourn losing. And even though I was having a wonderful time at a conference with my writer friends, I look melancholy.

What’s black-and-white and blue all over?

So call me trivial, call me vain. You won’t be the first; you won’t be the last. But I think clothes saved my life when I was at my lowest point — and maybe that’s the only clothing story I need to tell.

Read/reading: The Seer, Samantha Jayne Allen¹²; The Vanishing Family, Robert Kolker; All the World Can Hold, Jung Yun; The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, C. Thi Nguyen (audio); Desi Arnaz: The Man who Invented Television, Todd Purdum (audio); The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout (audio).

Rereading: Kinflicks, Lisa Alther; The Group, Mary McCarthy; Angel in Heavy Shoes, Lenora Mattingly Weber.

Me, me, me: Murder Takes a Vacation is out in paperback and it was just announced that it is Barnes & Noble’s mystery/thriller pick for June! I’m doing two Baltimore-area events. I’m in conversation with Jung Yun on June 6 at Barnes & Noble on the Avenue in White Marsh; on June 14, I’ll be at the Barnes & Noble in Westminster.

1. No one believes me when I say I get more work done in New Orleans, but I do.

2. Trying to be more social, it’s kind of an experiment. So far, so good.

3. I think it’s the paint color, but it could be New Orleans. Or maybe I’m just freakishly good-looking.

4. It was about being chic — and miserable — in Paris on my birthday, which happened to be nine days before my husband left me.

5. I understand that I’m “straight-size” or what some call “mid-size.” Whatever you call it, it’s a relatively privileged size, in that it’s easy to find clothes that fit. But in my family, I was considered HUGE.

6. Strength-training three times a week, 45-55 minutes of cardio twice a week, an average of 5.5 miles walked every day.

7. But it’s mostly about the male gaze, so it’s a relief of sorts. A woman’s admiration is much more meaningful.

8. A few stats on the gallery: Everything was purchased over the last six years, half of it used. The brands represented here include Anthropologie and Free People, which I have already noted are politically problematic. There is also Farm Rio and Brochu Walker, whose Havana Dress I own in four colors and two lengths, although I consider it a bit over-priced. (I bought one used.) The more expensive items — Proenza Schuler, STAUD, and Ulla Johnson — were all purchased used. Also some used Adam Lippes and Marissa Webb.

9. Only in the face; I’m not wasp-waisted like Polly.

10. Really tortured bit of wordplay in which I said I looked like a server at a dinner theater production of Man of LaMancha where I told my diners trying to decide between parmesan duos that “One pair of parms was like another.”

11. Actually, I think I’m happy in most of the selfies I took over the last five years, but I tend not to smile because I do have complicated feelings about my teeth.

12. A former student’s FOURTH novel, squee!