On Aprons
It’s been ages since I’ve posted anything here but life has been so busy! Here is a short piece I wrote for my publisher’s Website. It’s a feminist take on aprons!
Though I set my first novel in the fashion world, my interest in couture is largely metaphorical. I would be hard pressed to distinguish a Christian Lacroix from a Christian Dior and have not bought a fashion magazine in years. What appeals to me is fashion’s appetite for outlandish excess and for marrying the absurd with the sublime. I had the pleasure of practicing my fashionese when I wrote Remedy and this experience was not unlike reading Alice in Wonderland where one enters of world of queer pairings and alliteration, where the associative and the excessive poke their tongue at reason.
Despite the conformity of mass produced ready-wear, fashion craves and inspires fancy much as fairy stories do. Karen Blixen, the great writer of gothic tales, gave a name to each of her dresses and I suspect this whimsy of the wardrobe served to remedy the doldrums and repetition of getting dressed in the morning. Inside her closet hung a cast of friends who came to life once pulled over her head and zipped up her back; they flattered her until their threads wore thin. Following Blixen’s example, I once tried to christen a dress. It had kimono-style sleeves and touches of African wax. The sacrament was swift and easy to administer: I called it –rather appropriately I thought – Akiko Wemba and wore her to a fête the very evening of her baptism. Though cleansed of original sin, by nine p.m. after a debouched sojourn at the buffet table, she was ruined by indelible, oily splotches on the bodice. Deviled eggs were the culprit. Akiko Wemba died an early death but I find comfort in my believe that she now occupies a hanger in purgatory’s closet.
As the risk of sounding reactionary, I confess a longing for the uniform if only to simplify the daily what-to-wear problem. I have in mind a self-appointed, self-fashioned uniform, along the lines of what my character Remedy cooks up. Hers involved doing something wonderful to a Led Zepplin belt buckle but yours can be whatever you want it to be. What’s important is to be creative and to stick to it. Uniforms are easy – no thought is required once they are conceived – but relentless; they gain meaning through constancy and therefore must be worn every day, with the exception of weekends and holy days.
I keep my own uniforms in a kitchen drawer: five aprons, one for each day of the work week. Understandably, I do not wear them outside of the house. What may appear less understandable is that I don’t wear them in the kitchen either. These aprons are reserved for writing. I fell into the habit of wearing them at the desk by chance: one morning I arrived at my work post in apron because I had forgotten to remove it after washing the breakfast dishes. This kept happening and I didn’t fight it. The aprons felt right and reassuring as I faced the angst of creating something from nothing; they kept me on the straight and narrow, made me mindful of the demands of the art, which, after all, are not so different from those of cooking without a recipe. I store my quintet in a special drawer apart from their food-splattered homologues I wear when at the burner. My favorite of the writing aprons glows pinkly with rose-wreathed Virgin Marys; this Mary-Of-The-Apron looks about thirteen and unprepared for the primiparous undertaking that would bring her fame. It would be the perfect item to wear on a pilgrimage to Lourdes; it’s good at the writing desk too.
To many of us, aprons connote female servitude and the domestic drudgery to which they have bound their lady wearers over the ages. They alternately signify the stolid keeper of the hearth and the sexy newlywed wife or the proverbial French maid. But whether dumpy or kittenish, the apron’s associations set anchor in feminine seabed and there is a part of me that wants to redeem it from the archaic abyss and put it to work in service of the imagination. Certain high-minded feminists will cringe at this recycling of such an emblematic vestment, yet I hold that we can more readily advance our cause by reinvesting aprons with a higher purpose than by wearing pantsuits. Like many things that have been both denigrated and celebrated because of their intimate association with women (think motherhood, makeup, miniskirts, cold cream, curlers, hairspray, ballet, floral scented cleaning and hygiene products etc.) and hence lie at the crossroads of contradiction, aprons engage the kind of ambiguities on which literature thrives.
I once spotted a literary celebrity at Shakespeare and Co. in Paris wearing a tee-shirt which read “Fuck fashion.” I sighed when I saw it. I knew what she meant. I thought of that tense and fraught moment before leaving the house when I untied my apron and sifted through the closet for something better to wear than the pedestrian jean, something that wouldn’t prejudice me in the eyes of Latin Quarter Parisians. Yes, the whole pitiful business of trying to keep pace with the fashion stallions was maddening and in the final analysis, a burden to the ponies among us. Yet I can’t help thinking there might be a soft-spoken form of resistance, some other way of flipping the bird as it were. What if I took to the streets in an apron? There’s no reason to believe this would reap anything but ridicule, and yet…perhaps if I slipped on my shower bonnet on too?
As things now stand I can no more dissociate aprons from writing than I can wine from the dinner table: the match fits; a solidarity of substance has taken hold in my mind and the apron will be forever wedded to the narrative burners. When I tie the strings behind my back and head to the office my husband and son know I mean business. They also know that dinner will be Picard (France’s foremost frozen food store) and not the home-made blanquette de veau we’d much rather eat and which requires the other kind of apron. I’m thinking of revamping and enlarging my quintet and to this effect have put a request for aprons on my Christmas list. A nice addition would be a stars-and-stripes number to contrast the florals, 18th century love scenes and religious iconography stamped on my current collection. But Santa might have something else in mind. And I’m always game for surprises.
It happens in the depths of night, in bed; it is a private thing. When daylight bulges behind the curtains and wakes you, your head aches, your thoughts are desperate, but at least you will not be alone fighting your dragon for the next fifteen hours. It is odd, perhaps even presumptuous to be so burdened with St Michael’s battles while everyone is sleeping away the worries of the former day. Let me be clear: I do not want to wake up at three in the morning and stay awake until five or six, but this has been happening regularly for almost fifteen years now, despite trying nearly every remedy imaginable from sleeping pills (dreadful stuff – they jimmy the soul from the body) to acupuncture, to naturopathy, yoga, qi qong etc., all of which has led me to the conclusion that there is a recalcitrant someone in me who craves these intimate encounters with the dark: the reader.
Understandably the reader needs to read and when the duties of the day separate her from her defining task, she is obliged to burn the midnight oil. She has no qualms about waking you up and has the single-mindedness of a hungry newborn; she is all determination in the dark when your guards have gone off duty. And so I read, from three to five am, indulging her you might think, though this is not exactly the case. I use the reader as much as she uses me. For once I’m stunned awake, I am like a warrior of the most primitive kind, striking down the worries of the world and the smaller tracasseries of my own orbit with a crude planson; it is an endless, no-win battle, not at all like St. Michael’s noble and efficient slaying in fact, and only the reader shows me the route to a truce.
She steers my mind to a story. My bedside table is stacked and lined with books, which I read horizontally, simultaneously; I choose very carefully with Reader, for if the book is too exciting and fun, which recently was the case with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz), I can forget to fall back asleep entirely. Usually we must compromise to find just that right fit: a book with a pleasing enough story line to reel us in, but one whose syntax or plot twists require steady, rapt attention. It is precisely this salutary mental effort which will tire my mind enough to release its grasp on the rim of the Here and Now and slip down to the land of Nod.
The Village Voice Bookstore - Located at 6 rue Princess in the 6th arrondissement, this excellent, upscale bookstore is run by the dedicated Odile Hellier and hosts lively readings upstairs. Volumes of serious literature and philosophy line the shelves ( just found a superb book of interviews with Stockhuasen here) and Odile will always kindly order books she does not have in stock. 
Shakespeare and Company - Sylvia Whitman, daughter of the legendary George Whitman, now runs this left bank gem facing Notre Dame. The place retains its funky mien and still offers shelter to aspiring writers low on the dime. More recently Sylvia has been organizing a summer literary festival in conjunction with the Mairie de Paris and other high profile sponsors, bringing in big name authors. 