At the last minute, I decide to go home for my birthday. I tell Topper I miss Miss Mary, which is true enough. He says he understands. “I think you should go alone,” he says. “I think you need quality time down there, and not have to entertain me.” He’s standing by the desk, facingContinue reading “Chapter 56: Graceland Revisited”
Author Archives: My World of Interiors
Nobody Home: Cindy Sherman and the Self That Isn’t There
She has been a clown, a centrefold, a society matron, a fairy-tale victim, a film noir ingénue, a Renaissance duchess, a party guest, a disaster. She has never, in fifty years of making photographs, been herself. This is not evasion. It is the most radical position in contemporary art. By Bergotte There is no portraitContinue reading “Nobody Home: Cindy Sherman and the Self That Isn’t There”
Chapter 55: Got a Lot of Livin’ to Do!
Tilly and Buddy are married on the last Saturday of July at Grace Church in the City. The bride wears a loose-fitted dress, for obvious reasons. No one comments, not even the catty social pages, whom Tilly’s father has quietly bribed into discretion. The reception is a tasteful affair at The Pierre, the guest listContinue reading “Chapter 55: Got a Lot of Livin’ to Do!”
Carrie Fisher
Essay · Literature & Lives The Princess Who Wrote Her Way Out Carrie Fisher was a movie star who became a writer, which is the reverse of the usual trajectory and considerably the more interesting one. The writing she produced — the novels, the memoirs, the one-woman shows, the screenplay work, the wit deployed inContinue reading “Carrie Fisher”
Chapter 54: My Baby Left Me
I’m at the Ritz in Paris with Tilly and Cornelia. We’re here for the final fittings of Tilly’s wedding dress. It’s July, and Paris is sweltering, humid and close, the kind of heat that makes me regret coming at all. Every time I step outside, I feel coated in the city’s ever-present soot, sticky andContinue reading “Chapter 54: My Baby Left Me”
Debbie Reynolds
Essay · Film & Lives The Girl Who Outlasted Everything Debbie Reynolds was not the most critically celebrated actress of her generation, nor the most artistically adventurous, nor the one the serious film culture tended to reach for when it needed an example of Hollywood at its best. She was something rarer and in someContinue reading “Debbie Reynolds”
Chapter 53: “Veritatem Dilexi” – Commencement
The results are back for our exams and our theses.Tilly: summa cum laude. Me: magna cum laude. Tilly says it’s only because I’ve been busy with boys that I didn’t graduate summa like she did. “You’ve been juggling two of the country’s most eligible bachelors, from opposite ends of the social strata. That’s quite aContinue reading “Chapter 53: “Veritatem Dilexi” – Commencement”
Albert King
Essay · Music & Lives The Velvet Bulldozer Albert King was six feet four inches tall and played a right-handed guitar upside down and left-handed, without a pick, bending strings that were already fighting him — strung the wrong way, the tension reversed, producing a sound so specific and so irreducible that no one whoContinue reading “Albert King”
My World of Interiors 