When I was twenty-one, I became friends with a group of models living in London and for a while we ran wild together, night after night in the city. The champagne was endless, the venues exclusive, and the stories they told me were spectacular.

They were stories of excessive fees paid for lunch dates and whole lives of luxury funded in secret by benevolent billionaires. I couldn’t help but wonder why I’d never read a novel about it before, this glamorous and complex world in which the lines were blurred and the limits extinguished.

I was stunned by the currencies at play, all the privilege afforded by looking a certain way and knowing the right people, or where to find them at least. The power dynamics of these interactions intrigued me. I planned to write my own novel and I dreamt up characters and scenarios inspired by what I’d seen and heard.

I knew the story would be exciting not just because it would illuminate a secretive world but because it would be a story of now, of the internet, of feminism, of capitalism, of sexual agency, all coming together in a way that wouldn’t have been possible at any other time. And then there was the appeal of dissecting the “sugaring” world, one of young, attractive sugar babies and older, monied sugar daddies.

The anthropologist in me was fascinated with the prospect of chronicling this world with all its own customs, terms and expectations. I collated my journals and my scrawled imaginings and committed to finishing a first draft of the novel that would become my debut, Sugar, Baby.

This is a reading list with a common theme: women who paint and polish their beauty into a gleaming currency of its own. These women are aware of the way the world works and use their looks to their advantage in a patriarchal system. It’s true across the board that beauty opens doors for these women and provides opportunities to improve their lives. They garner varied results, sometimes finding that the life they earn with their beauty is not necessarily the one they really want, and that playing a role and dressing in a costume has lasting consequences that will ripple through their lives forever.

I have enjoyed these books immensely. They explore some fascinating themes, ones I also touch on in Sugar, Baby, among them: obsession with physical perfection, extreme beauty standards, transactional relationships with men and improving one’s status in society by employing strategic relationships with people in power.

One thing I especially like about these books is the way they treat the inner world of the women with respect and curiosity. There is no sense of a judgmental authorial voice hanging overhead. These women are complex with their own desires, dreams and ambitions. Their lives take twists and turns along which they discover both the full gleaming extent and the stark wanting scarcity of what beauty can buy you.

*

 Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls

A classic for a reason. Set across the fifties and sixties, beautiful and sophisticated Anne Welles, moves to New York to work as a secretary at a dramatic agency. She befriends scrappy up-and-comer with enormous talent Neely O’Hara and ravishing beauty with a complicated past Jennifer North, and the three women navigate career, men and friendship together in the entertainment business and beyond.

This is a compulsively readable book with brilliantly crafted dialogue and prose that interrogates many complex themes with originality. For me, many of the character’s discoveries about themselves rang with truth and recognizability. It made me laugh, it made me cry: it’s a favorite for all time.

 Emma Cline, The Guest

On the East End of Long Island, Alex is living with the extraordinarily wealthy Simon, swimming in his pool and selecting her outfits from a brand new designer wardrobe. Everything’s going well until she makes a dreadful mistake at a dinner party one night and then suddenly everything is in jeopardy. We follow Alex as she does her very best to cling onto her new life. We know something terrible has happened, that Alex is something of a kleptomaniac and she’s hiding from someone, we know that she has escorted in the past but not much else about her.

Personally, I love a heroine with dubious morals and explorations of the experiences of modern sex-workers that take the reader to unexpected places. This novel contains sharp and funny observations about the American upper classes as the protagonist, Alex, wanders through their world of luxury. It shows the fragile and uncertain ground that Alex’s relationship with Simon is built on. The Guest is a novel of astonishing details and beautiful prose, taut with such thrilling tension throughout that it makes the controversial ending worth it.

Frances Cha, If I Had Your Face

I’ve only just started this one but I’m enjoying every word so far. If I Had Your Face is set in contemporary Seoul. It’s a story about four young women, Kauri, Milo, Ara, and Wonna, who live in the same apartment building. These women navigate their lives against a backdrop of extreme standards of beauty, mostly achieved through dangerous surgeries, and a society where the most attractive women can make a lot of money in “room salons” catering to wealthy men.

It’s a society where beauty explicitly equals privilege. It’s a story about beauty, wealth, power and class but also female strength in a patriarchal world and the importance of friendship.

Mona Awad, Rouge

With gorgeous, whimsical imagery and rhapsodic language, this is a modern fairy-tale with teeth. A lonely dress shop clerk, Mirabelle, has grown up in awe of her mother’s beauty, believing herself to be an inferior imitation. Her mother easily attracted attention, was admired for her good looks and maintained her appearance with a strict routine.

Upon her mother’s death she discovers that her mother’s obsession with beauty was “culty” in more than one sense of the word: she had gone “the way of the roses.”

Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

Another much-loved and frequently read favorite of mine. A detailed and gorgeously painted work of historical fiction that recounts the life story of Nitta Sayuri, who is sold by her family from a poor fishing village to a Geisha House in Kyoto where she learns the intricate customs of the competitive world of the Geishas, going on to become the most celebrated of them all. Sayuri experiences loss, friendship, fear, and love along her transformative journey which spans World War II.

The poignant images of the novel leave a mark on the reader as Sayuri learns the trade of feminine allure, of dance and music, of eroticism and ultimately how to hide her true feelings beneath the Geisha mask in order to become successful, though through it all, hope remains. A must-read!

______________________________

Sugar, Baby by Celine Saintclare is available via Bloomsbury.

Despite its ubiquity, there’s more to eyeliner than meets the eye. This seldom-examined object frames the eyes of women on the New York City subway and nomads in the savannahs of Chad. Instagram influencers experiment with graphic liner designs, and supermodels sport wings on Paris runways. Per religious tradition, living goddesses in Nepal decorate their eyes with the cosmetic, channeling tales both past and present.

When they can’t access retail liner, some women prisoners in the US make their own with pencil graphite and Vaseline. Fashion-conscious beatniks paired eyeliner with berets, and Russian dancers of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes donned flicks of it while onstage. Even Mesopotamians may have used kohl, applying it with a stick shaped like a spatula. While they didn’t use kohl as prolifically as the ancient Egyptians, ancient Greek women darkened their eyes with a mixture of soot, antimony, and burnt cork.

The Prophet Muhammad was said to have worn a form of eyeliner, too, and spoke of its healing properties. There are traces of the cosmetic in the Old Testament, which mentions figures, including Jezebel, with “painted eyes”; two were “harlots,” though the use of eye paint was not strictly considered objectionable per the scriptures. A vast and by no means comprehensive array of individuals, indeed, such is eyeliner’s staying power.

After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, eyeliner sales soared—and lipstick sales plummeted—due to the widespread use of face masks. In 2021, the eye makeup industry’s value rose to $15.6 billion; it is expected to expand further to $21.4 billion by 2027. The growth trajectory is staggering. It comes as no surprise, however, that eyeliner and eye pencils constitute the largest market segment, edging out mascara and eyeshadow by 5 percent.

Throughout time and across space, the primary purpose of applying eyeliner has remained the same: to make the eyes appear larger or more attractive. Depending on the day, eyeliner wearers may be sultry or demure, rebellious or clean-cut, low-key or loud. Like ink itself, eyeliner helps us deliver messages to the world: we are confident, we express ourselves, we are our own creations. There’s an eyeliner style and a story for virtually every look. Some are even protecting themselves from evil spirits or honoring a god, while others may be treating their eyes for an infection or blocking the sun.

The art of eyeliner application can be painstakingly precise: experts employ the care and consideration a painter or a calligrapher might use on a blank canvas. The rules are many, though malleable, and the technique can take years to perfect. The applicator must move steadily, to ensure the pigment glides seamlessly onto the eyelid or waterline. Apply too thick a line to the lid, and you risk shrinking the eye; apply lines that bleed, and you may give your eyes an undesirable raccoon effect.

Different eye shapes can suit different styles—a black line on the lower waterline can make small eyes look smaller, whereas a single line along the upper lid may make them look bigger. Hinging on the angle of the upturn, wings can widen the eye—or, according to one TikToker, even reveal whether the wearer is a millennial or Gen Z. A small twitch of the hand may necessitate starting from scratch, a time thief that spares almost no one.

Applicators come in many forms, from fingers and bones to brushes and plastic rods. Some people use their pinkies to finetune their imperfect lines, while others use stencils, wipes, or cotton swabs. Color and consistency are important, too. Black eyeliner can be aging, while brown, green, or blue can be more flattering. (Princess Diana famously wore blue eyeliner, likely to echo the blue in her eyes.) Liquid, gel, and cream eyeliners are best used on lids, while pencils and powders work well on waterlines. And then there’s the shape and length of the lines; the choices are endless, as Instagrammers and TikTokers have made clear. Your eyeliner can even be “sharp enough to kill a man,” declares one popular meme—and cat-eye devotee Taylor Swift.

The effort pays off. Eyeliner, of course, can make a person appear significantly more attractive, and attractiveness, or “pretty privilege,” is meaningfully associated with a disturbingly wide range of positive social and economic outcomes (though often a woman would have to be “conventionally” attractive to benefit from this privilege). Women, especially women of color, are held to high and specific standards when it comes to their appearance at work.

In the office, women who wear the right kind of makeup— not too heavy, not too light—are seen as more competent and effective leaders; a pronounced wing may be looked at less favorably than tightlining. When worn well, eyeliner can give the illusion of doe eyes, implying youth. And those with “baby faces” are thought to fare better in life as they’re perceived to be more honest, trustworthy, or charismatic than others.

Conversely, some young people wear eyeliner to appear older or more mature. Twelve-year-olds Alice Craig and Cristina Wilson, grade-school classmates who now attend different Manhattan middle schools, gather in friends’ bedrooms on weekends to trade eyeliner techniques gleaned from YouTube tutorials. Among their group, the girls explained, eyeliner is the cosmetic of choice. “It’s not about looking ‘cute,’” Wilson says. “Eyeliner makes you look cool and bold. It makes you look older, too. It’s not like anyone will think you’re fifteen. But maybe they’ll take you more seriously.”

“A lot of girls we know mostly use makeup to cover up things they think are flaws, or they’re doing something subtle to look prettier but natural,” says Craig. “I think if that makes you feel more confident, go for it. But my friends and I don’t find that way of using makeup very interesting. Eyeliner is different. It’s basically the opposite of subtle or ‘naturally pretty.’ Eyeliner shows your personality.”

This is eyeliner’s sheer power, unmatched by those other items in your makeup bag.

*

Eyeliner can be found in practically every corner of the cultural landscape. It is frequently used as a tool to signify transformation, often flicking at themes of adulthood, theatricality, allure, sensuality, power, or defiance. On Western screens, high-intensity eyeliner has also been used to signify madness or transgression. Femme fatales such as Akasha, played by the late Aaliyah in the 2002 film Queen of the Damned, and Julie Marsden, played by Bette Davis in the 1938 film Jezebel, were made up in eyeliner (Graham Greene memorably described Davis as having “popping, neurotic eyes, a kind of corrupt and phosphorescent prettiness”). Twisted male protagonists like the late Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight and Robert Pattinson in The Batman wore smudged lines.

In the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, several of the rebellious female inmates at a New York prison creatively and consistently trace their eyes with pigment, my favorite look being the long and thin flicks worn by the gutsy Maritza Ramos, played by Diane Guerrero. In Game of Thrones, the nomadic group known as the Dothraki wear eyeliner prolifically, particularly its male warriors on horseback.

The troubled chess player portrayed by Anya Taylor-Joy in The Queen’s Gambit draws lines that grow more dramatic as she becomes progressively more unhinged; in an alcohol-induced haze, she paints floating lines a centimeter below her natural lower lashes, producing an uncanny, doll-like effect. Eyeliner, incidentally, isn’t always used on the eyes. John Waters, the American filmmaker and director, creates his trademark pencil mustache with Maybelline’s Expert Wear Velvet Black eyeliner.

Eyeliner has also served practical purposes in the arts. During the 1920s, with the introduction of “movie palaces,” films were broadcast in black and white, and directors required that cast members line their eyes to ensure they popped against a monochrome backdrop. In theater and opera historically performed against candles or lamplights, eyeliner was applied liberally to performers’ faces to help the audience see their expressions more clearly.

Some celebrities and artists have had especially intimate relationships to their liner, so much so that it became a trademark that they would be unrecognizable without. Consider, for a moment, Amy Winehouse without her graphic wings, or a barefaced Trixie Mattel.

*

Around the world, eyeliner is recognized as a transformative tool. But its historical beginnings are deeply rooted in Eastern traditions, notably in ancient Egypt, where the earliest known usage dates back to at least 3100 BCE. There, eyeliner was not merely turned to for beautification; it also had medicinal and spiritual significance.

In Africa’s ancient Land of Punt, galena was likely used as a source for kohl, as evidenced by trade between the kingdom and ancient Egyptians. People across the continent, from Berbers in Morocco and Oromos in Ethiopia to nomads in Chad, also use kohl to repel the sun and to beautify or medicate their eyes. However one refers to eyeliner in the Global South—kajal, kohl, surma, or sormeh—the cosmetic has been highly influential, and can convey messages about power, religiosity, and a commitment to moral codes.

In the Arab world and spanning swaths of Asia and Africa, some mothers still apply kohl to their newborns’ eyes to ward off the evil eye, the superstition that a jealous glance or gaze can cause harm. Across South Asia and Africa, many Muslims don’t look at kohl, surma, or kajal as makeup, but rather as an element of their faithfulness and an integral part of preparing for religious holidays including Eid and Ramadan.

Communities of color today also use eyeliner to express themselves and assert their identities in the face of marginalization and white supremacy. Ziwe Fumudoh, an American talk show host who went viral for pressing her interviewees on Black culture and politics, often boasts a signature eyeliner look. “Most hosts are like, ‘What’s your next project? How can we promote it?’ as opposed to ‘How many Black friends do you have? What do you like about Black people qualitatively?’” she told Allure in September 2020. “I’m asking those questions with my intense eyeliner and pigment on my face. I’m trying to contextualize these products that I have and bring them into conversations about race and class and gender…. Nothing exists in a vacuum. I don’t exist in a vacuum, the makeup I wear doesn’t exist in a vacuum.”

New York–based writer Elaine Louie, who’s been wearing smudged kohl ever since she was a teenager living in San Francisco, says she’s so committed to her look, she sleeps in her lines. “Back in the day, I ruined oodles of white sheets,” she says as she shares her kohl memories with me. “Now I have charcoal-gray sheets,” which help obscure residue, she adds, joking that she sometimes even reapplies it in the middle of the night.

Jokes aside, Louie, like so many of the figures in this book, and like so many people around the world, myself included, turned to eyeliner as she came of age to help enlarge her eyes, find her personal style, and boost her confidence. “It wasn’t just about how you looked,” the eighty-year-old writer, who is of Chinese heritage, says. “It was about how you felt. It was about this aura you have. That maybe you were just a little bit exotic.” Taking it a step further, Rosana Cipriano, a resident of Rio de Janeiro, says, “Eyeliner can even bring my soul out of my eyes.”

*

This book embarks on a journey through time and across continents to tell just a few of these stories about our enduring obsession with a remarkable substance. Beginning, fittingly, in the East, we’ll delve into ancient Egypt to understand the original beauty icon, Queen Nefertiti, and her lasting influence on eyeliner use. Challenging the notion that beauty is an inherently female preoccupation, we’ll turn to the Wodaabe people in the savanna region of Chad. To demonstrate how sormeh has been used as a critical instrument for self-expression and political resistance, we’ll reflect on the eruption of protests in the wake of the killing of Mahsa Amini in Iran.

Next, we’ll travel to Petra, Jordan, to illustrate how kohl helps communities maintain and celebrate centuries-old traditions. We’ll then get to know Mexican American cholas in California and see how eyeliner can assert cultural pride in the face of racial discrimination and marginalization. Investigating kajal’s relationship with the divine and the ethereal, we’ll wander over to India to visit Kerala’s storytellers. We’ll later explore the social implications of the eyes and eye contact in Japan, and meet a millennial geisha in Kyoto.

Back in the West, we’ll attend drag shows in New York, exploring the connection between this transformative cosmetic and gender. With a focus on Amy Winehouse, we’ll observe the phenomenon of the Western pop star, and witness how the substance can play a significant role in one’s physical and psychological development and protection—and even in one’s mental health. Finally, we’ll meet a few of the influencers both shaping and responding to ever-evolving beauty ideals in the age of social media.

*

Eurocentric beauty norms have dominated the global beauty discourse in decades past, alternately by suppressing and mocking or fetishizing and cherry-picking unique cultural features and practices found in and founded by so-called exotic societies and groups. This book is a celebration of the innovative contributions of people of color to the beauty industry and the vibrant array of beauty practices around the world.

I ask you, dear reader, to eschew the Western gaze, and to sensitively and thoughtfully expand your understanding of beauty, as well as of the relationship between beauty and power. Though these chapters attest to the rich cultural history of eyeliner, the liner itself is, ultimately, an accessory to a far bigger story, one that encompasses human ambition and creativity, innovation and versatility . To wear eyeliner and to learn about its origins is to bring not only ourselves, but also some of the world’s most fascinating cultures, into focus.

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From Eyeliner: A Cultural History by Zahra Hankir, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Zahra Hankir.

In the summer darkness of the Massachusetts Berkshires, my friends and I build a fire. These are not just any friends—they’re dear friends from high school, friends I rarely see anymore because of distance and moving and money and all else that comes with growing up. It’s been two years since all six of us have been together in person.

So much has had to happen for us to even get here: the slow rollout of the vaccines in the spring, saving paychecks, finessing work schedules, booking the house listed as a Shangri-La. That’s how we found ourselves there, in semi-seclusion off pebbled roads, encircled by dark green pine and oak and hardwood trees, the crickets absorbing our voices.

And as we all sit around this fire, I’m doing my best to soak in every single second. I look at Pierce and remember him years earlier at morning assembly, in his afro era, giving the best speech on the environment I’d ever heard. I listen to Soleil and think about Hyde Park, the neighborhood we share, how people believe Black Boston doesn’t exist.

I watch Seth throw another piece of wood into the pit and think that if anyone found us here, five Black and brown people with only one white person in the middle of nowhere, they’d all think we’d kidnapped him or were in some kind of cult. Instead of for Natasha’s birthday, for our friendships, for the first vacation we’ve ever embarked on as a group.

I’m doing my best to not take this for granted: that we’re all surrounded by love in a beautiful place, with clean air, in the backyard of someone who was gracious enough to let us rent it for the weekend. But I also feel sadness lightly knocking on the door. Because these moments, moments spent with people who look like me and my friends, moments hiking, moments laying down in the grass, moments listening to the song sparrows, don’t happen enough. I’m doing my best to not take this for granted because the end of the trip always comes way too soon.

*

At the beginning of the music video for the rapper JID’s “29 Freestyle,” the camera follows behind JID and Rob as they trudge through a stream. In this shot, JID wears a forest camouflage outfit except for the fitted cap on his head. As they walk, JID and his friends humorously consider the potential of eight-foot-long river snakes. After this exchange, the video cuts and JID’s off-beat Atlantan drawl takes over. Over the course of the video, JID and his dear homies are presented in the great outdoors—off-roading on dirt roads, fishing and smoking blunts in rivers, flexing in wooded clearings, throwing up the middle finger in prairies.

Signed to J. Cole’s label, Dreamville Records, JID has often been described by critics as one of the next heirs of “real hip-hop,” opting for concept albums, narrative driven music videos, and an emphasis on MCing and storytelling. Yet, to label him simply as a lyrical rapper or a spitter with hard bars ignores JID’s many talents, as seen in his beautiful singing on The Forever Story’s “Kody Blu 31” or his appearance on the pop song “Enemy” by Imagine Dragons.

Musically, “29 Freestyle” displays JID as fans know him best: lyrically playful, punchy and clever, switching flows out of nowhere into a pocket you didn’t know existed. At the same time though, the song, with its lack of hooks and its release as a loose single, is also unorthodox by JID’s standards.

The music video accompanying “29 Freestyle” largely departs from JID’s story-driven visuals and imagery too. His videos, often set in the suburban or urban South, act out what’s happening in the music or provide greater context for the meanings of his songs.

In the video for the aforementioned “Kody Blu 31,” there are some flashes of trees and greenery, but the land in this video holds a different meaning than the images in “29 Freestyle.” The land in “Kody Blu 31” is the land of his family, land he re-bought after his grandmother passed away, so that he and his family would never lose it. The imagery of “Kody Blu 31” stuns and touches the viewer, but with context, is also heavier and more serious, as are most works about land and Black people in the United States.

What I love about “29 Freestyle” is the fact that we get to witness JID and his homies experience the outdoors, simply existing and living, with an infectious joy and freeness and lightness. And while the images of “Kody Blu 31” are extremely important and powerful, the images of “29 Freestyle” are just as important, too.

*

When “29 Freestyle” came out in June last year, I couldn’t get enough. I rewatched it over and over again. I sent it to all of my friends. I already appreciated JID and his penchant for hard bars and comedic moments, sure, but I knew I treasured this video because of something else.

JID’s music video is important because it serves as a reminder: to be Black and in nature is cool. I have no other way of saying that any time I see Black people in nature it’s really cool. I feel fucking cool. It always looks really, really, fucking fly. For lack of a better word, what JID did is simply dope. But this video also felt different because of what it evoked: longing.

While watching, I found myself longing for more visions of young Black people experiencing the great outdoors, in green spaces, on the land. Young Black people like JID and his friends, young Black people like me and Pierce and Soleil, and Amir, who I majored in Environmental Studies with, one of my best friends, doing whatever we wanted, without questioning our respect or our care or our right to be there in the first place.

The video made me think about how mainstream Western art often depicts people in nature. Historically, these images portray white men in their own solitude, living and surviving and foraging alone in a so-called wilderness, finding answers to some philosophical question. Thoreau, in his little cabin in Massachusetts for those two years, “contemplating” alone all day. Muir, quietly looking out onto the landscape of Yosemite, hands crossed behind his back, and then returning to his cabin by the river. Painters like Thomas Cole, presenting what they believe they’ve only seen—dense, empty foliage, and if not empty, with a handful of white people, in their “simple” clothing, seemingly enjoying their time, free from anyone disturbing them.

An ominous white cloud of silence hanging over all of these images, silence one of their most important and championed ideals. In the wilderness, but still adhering to perceptions of civility: never acting too “wild,” never displaying emotions, never acting or dressing like urban people. These images, some more than two hundred years old, still directing and impacting our expectations of what a “real” outdoors experience looks like.

These images, the exact opposite of “29 Freestyle.” What would Thoreau say of Black men smoking blunts while they’re on a hike? What would Muir think of his dear national parks as the setting for a rap music video, all of the actors bumping and grinding amongst the trees, posing with ice in their mouths on mountain peaks, in the valleys, shining from the cliffside? What would happen to Emerson’s dear Nature if Nature was full of Black and brown people, laughing, singing Nicki Minaj on the way to the outlook, posing for pictures with fallen branches, recording each other while sprinting on the paths and jumping off boulders?

JID’s video makes you realize the answer to these questions don’t even matter—simply by his presence, he re-contextualizes the outdoors by existing there as a Black person. In his re-contextualization, he pushes against the images of those white men, creating new ones that are more applicable to our experiences and our realities.

I cherish the “29 Freestyle” music video because it is proof. Proof of Black people in the woods for no reason or ulterior motive. Proof that Black people enjoy leisurely time outside. Proof that Black people can have a positive relationship to the outdoors. Proof of all of the small joys: JID and his friends smiling as they race over the dirt hills. JID running across a prairie, dancing and swinging his dreads with towering green trees as his audience. JID finally catching a fish and pumping his fist and looking at it closely and posing with it. JID, accidentally loosening his grip. The fish, tumbling out of his hands, back into the water.

*

The trouble with this tradition of artists those like Emerson and Thoreau and Muir is that they didn’t make room for us. They didn’t make room for what we might look, what we might sound like, what we might want when we find ourselves in the places they defined as “Nature.” They tried to capture all of the imagination for themselves, so that no one could imagine anyone else in their place.

The so-called pioneers of the American environmental movement, erasing everyone and all other possibilities in the process, so that they could see only themselves and their cabins. Their individualist, masculine imagination, the most authentic, the most real, everything else either a parody or an inaccurate representation. In many ways, still the gold standard of interacting with the environment and natural world, a supposed escape from the modern life we find ourselves in.

But I don’t want to be like Emerson, Thoreau, or Muir. Removing themselves from their communities, often experiencing all of this on their own and then living on to tell everyone else about it. I never wanted what they have and I never will. I want me and my people to be something else entirely, unattached from the definitions of these white men and their definition of nature. I want me and my people to be something those white men could never have even fathomed.

So much me and my people still haven’t experienced, because of those men, so much me and my people still need to accurately represent us in these spaces. So many possibilities we haven’t been given the room to imagine, so many possibilities we still don’t even have the words for. So many words that are still missing, that start with us, that apply to us and sound like us and look like us.

We need a word for a group of Black people who are outside. We need a word for a group of Black people at the park. We need a word for a group of Black people in a set of trees. We need a word for a group of Black people on a hike. We need a word for a group of Black people on the peak of a snowy mountain. We need a word for a group of Black people at the beach. We need a word for a group of Black people who are in the middle of play. We need a word for a group of Black people playing volleyball in the sand. We need a word for a group of Black people swimming in the ocean. We need a word for a group of Black people in the desert.

We need a word for a group of Black people at the lake. We need a word for a group of Black people in a garden. We need a word for a group of Black people pulling weeds. We need a word for a group of Black people eating fruits and vegetables. We need a word for a group of Black people on a farm. We need a word for a group of Black people petting goats and milking cows and chasing chickens. We need a word for a group of Black people in the sun.

We need a word for a group of Black people on a camping trip. We need a word for a group of Black people sitting around a bonfire. We need a word for a group of Black people looking up at the sky. We need a word for a group of Black people who fall asleep in tents under the stars.

*

Here’s what I long for: spending time outdoors with the people that I appreciate, my best friends and my family and my acquaintances and everyone else I might one day love. And I know I sound selfish, but I want more. In addition to the memories I already have, in addition to the moments that already exist. No matter how much I have, I long for more and more and more.  No matter how much more I get, it will never be enough. I want it perpetually. I want it always.

I’m outside in the river again with Amir, carrying yardsticks and pretending they’re swords and watching the water float downstream. The sun starting to set, when me and Kenneth find that waterfall by accident and we touch the water and watch how it leaves the rocks slick and we listen to it flow down in the quiet. After months of not seeing each other, after a year of living together and talking about going on a hike but never being able to.

At the lake, Natasha the first in the water, gently floating before we get in. All of us screaming that it’s cold. Edriel and Rosiel, my little siblings, reading the information tag of every single plant at the Arboretum, picking their favorites, measuring themselves next to the bushes, guessing their names. Pierce, in a tree by himself. Then, me, climbing up with him. And then Adi rising up next to me, only to be followed by Seth, and then Soleil and then Natasha.

And then I see all of my friends, every single friend I’ve made ever, in the same tree, beaming and giggling and telling their favorite stories and examining different kinds of leaves and smelling the pine cones and debating how they might taste. The voices of all of my friends, every single one, in the branches above me and below me and next to me and close behind me and right in front of me. All of us in that tree, touching the trunk and feeling its bark and all of its layers at the same time. All of us, in that tree, in our own kind of embrace.

*

The best part of JID’s music video is that it exists at all, on the internet, in someone’s hard drive somewhere, forever, its own kind of testament, its own kind of archive. Of JID and his friends, of young Black people experiencing what shouldn’t be novel to so many of us, but definitely is.

And I’m definitely a little jealous of the video, compounded by how cool it looks and the editing and the video effects and the fact that they have the equipment to do it all. But hear me out for a second. When I’m outside, I want the cameras on me too. That’s when I want the cameras on me most of all. Not because of narcissism or because I want to post on Instagram or because I want to drop a fire music video.

I want the cameras on me when I’m outdoors because I want proof. For documentation, for the building of an archive, of me, of all my people, in this beautiful green world that we want to desperately save but is also disappearing. For me, and the people that I love, in places that might not last forever. To be able to show to others, to be able to show to my children and my children’s children.

Like when we all pause to look at the crows in the yellow field. Like that time we scared the deer and the deer scared us. Or that time we found that beautiful cocoon, threads perfectly straight, bisecting the hiking path, spinning and spinning and spinning. All of us leaning in so close we almost touched it with our noses. All of these moments special to me because they happened. Memorable to me because I experienced them with someone else, in a place where I still don’t feel like I should be or haven’t been enough.

And to me, that’s the difference between the Nature that I want and the idea of Nature expounded by people like Thoreau and Emerson and Muir. Unlike them, I’ve always longed to experience Nature with the people important to me, with my communities and the communities I might one day be part of. Unlike them, I’ve never longed to be on this journey by myself or for myself, to transcend and find spiritual “insight” on my own.

Because most of the time, everything I learn or remember from those moments in the outdoors is from my relationship with others, from the memories of folks coming together, folks whose access has been historically limited. Folks whose access, with climate change and environmental change, will never be the same as those other white men in the first place.

Which makes JID’s video, and any kind of documentation of Black people, of marginalized peoples, in the great outdoors, on the green parts of this world, even more essential. Why we must create our own nature archives, our own Black nature archives, existing in all of these places. So that we can make the room that was never allotted to us. So that we can make room for ourselves and provide another vision, a more inclusive and holistic vision, of a new Nature.

I always long for my Black nature archive to be more full, to be more robust, for it to continue growing. I always feel like I haven’t experienced enough. But right now, that doesn’t matter.

Because here’s what I do have: a picture of Amir in the sun, knee deep in the river, the water sparkling around him. A picture of Edriel and Rosiel, hiding underneath the needles of a low-hanging pine tree, the green gently touching and crowning their heads. Kenneth, posing at the outlook, a city of one hundred year old trees at his back, the cell tower in the distance the only visible sign of Boston. A picture of Adi and Soleil sharing the weight of a backpack on a hike, one strap on each of their shoulders. A picture of Pierce, Seth, Natasha, Soleil, Adi, and me, sitting on a fallen log, exhausted, smiling so wide, at the stranger who offered to take the picture for us.

And the picture exists. Like JID’s video, these pictures, my own proof. I’m looking at them right now. And they are more than enough.

Image courtesy Magnolia Pictures

Is the point of art to bring us into ourselves, or out? I mean the Parkway theater is my favorite place to go to get out of the heat—I can even stare at the high-concept magenta wallpaper in the bathrooms, digitized popcorn kernels “oating” by. Or notice the shining light outside as it settles over the decaying turn-of-the-century buildings across Charles Street, all those gorgeous reds and browns and look at those plants growing through the cracks in the bricks.

Usually when I go to an old theater I study the details, but with this theater you walk in and you just think: architect. Because the whole place has been gutted, and reimagined. Where did they get all this money?

Tonight I’m watching Boom for Real: The Late-Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat, which reveals nothing about Basquiat that wasn’t already part of the public record—he was brilliant and wild, charming and manipulative, seductive and ambitious—he was homeless as a teenager, he did a lot of drugs, he became the toast of the art world, he died way too young.

Everyone already knows the myth that Basquiat was a lone genius destroying convention to create his own form. Yes, he was driven to remake himself as a lone visionary in order to become a top-tier art-world  commodity, and this actually happened, which is rare for anyone, especially a Black artist, but we already know this killed him, so why portray posthumous canonization as a glorious path? Unless the movie is just about making more money for the ghouls of the art world who have already made millions and millions from Basquiat’s death from an overdose at age twenty-seven.

I’m thinking about the Basquiat show I saw in Seattle in 1994, six years after his death—gazing at those paintings I felt an immediate sensory kinship with the dense layers of self-expression, the wildness, the raw beauty, the way language was interwoven with the visual, became the visual, until it was overcome by it. The movement, the free association that became a method and a system of organization, the disorientation that opens the mind.

The way we can create our own language, the symbols and the strength, the bending, the mesmerizing nurturing scream. I left that show wanting to create, knowing I could create, knowing. In the lobby of the Parkway Theatre there’s a flyer for a new building  across from the train station that says:

THE ART OF BALTIMORE

NOW LEASING.

In the photo, it just looks like your average prefab yuppie loft to me, so I’m not sure where the art is, but I guess they mean this neighborhood, designated by the city as an ARTS DISTRICT to change blight into bright lights. The marketing of Baltimore as a creative hub—artists as tools for displacement, a sad story that has obliterated so many neighborhoods over the last several decades, but here it feels more blatant. Maybe because these funded institutions sit in an area so obviously neglected by the city for so long.

Just across the street from the Parkway there are Black people slumped on their stoops in drugged-out immobility due to decades of structural neglect, and next door there’s Motor House, an art gallery/theater/bar complex with a design show called “Undoing the Red Line.”

I walk out of the Parkway, and the graffiti on the street doesn’t look  that different than the graffiti in the movie. Is it on display? As if to say: We want what happened in New York in the ’80s to happen here, now. There’s even an alley behind Motor House where graffiti is legal, and all day long there are photo shoots and staged parties promoting multicultural consumption in a segregated city.

Back on Charles, where there’s another movie theater, and then half a block of upscale bistros, and then everything ends at the bridge over the highway and there’s the train station, illuminated. I turn the corner and there’s some huge new building like a spaceship that’s landed to promote gentrification, so much air conditioning that there’s a giant puddle  in the asphalt.

Oh, wait, that’s the building from the flyer, the Nelson Kohl Apartments, this is it, with a wood-paneled entry and a white cube gallery in the lobby showing bland abstract art, two rectangular fiberglass planters in front, painted black and textured to look like cement. Two grasses planted to one side, and then four almost-dead grasses on the other. The entrance faces the parking lot over the highway, with the train station on the other side. I stand outside to watch for anyone going in, but they must all be inside with their air conditioning.

I decide to go to the show at Motor House—the bar in front looks like a suburban advertisement for urban living, but the show in the lobby is actually about redlining. It’s mostly about New York and DC, although I do learn a few things about Cross Keys Village, where I went with Gladys as a kid, a sprawling gated housing development in  Baltimore—a mixture of townhouses, a hotel, and mid-rise buildings in a leafy enclave, complete with a Frank Gehry–designed high-rise and a mall that includes Betty Cooke’s modernist gift shop that Gladys loved.

Apparently Cross Keys was marketed to both Black and white home owners when it was built in the 1960s, unlike the whites-only history of neighborhoods nearby, like working-class Hampden and posh Roland  Park.

At Motor House they have a sign thanking the city for funding the space—I look it up when I get home, and it cost six million to renovate, funded by an organization called BARCO, or Baltimore Arts Realty Corporation, dedicated to “creating working spaces for Baltimore’s growing community of artists, performers, makers and artisans.” BARCO also recently completed an $11.5 million renovation of another space in the area, Open Works.

I look up the Parkway Theatre, and the renovation cost $18.5 million, including a five million grant from a Greek foundation. So there was international funding involved. For a movie theater in Baltimore. Then there’s the nineteen million spent by another nonprofit developer, Jubilee, to renovate the Centre Theatre to house the Johns Hopkins and MICA film programs right around the corner. This is a staggering amount of money in a city struggling for basic services.

All this empty corporatized language promoting Baltimore as an arts hub, a creative crossroads, a robust creative sector, an incubator for the creative economy. Which fits right in with the marketing of the Nelson Kohl Apartments, named after two famous dead designers who had nothing to do with it, and claiming to be THE ART OF BALTIMORE, with studios starting at fifteen hundred dollars, “surrounded by art, music, restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and one of the world’s premiere art colleges. When you live here, you can paint your own canvas—differently every day.”

Fifteen hundred dollars for a studio, in a city that’s mostly in collapse. Walking back up Charles, there’s a performance space in a former dry cleaner’s where everyone looks like the people in the Basquiat  movie—the same ’80s outfits, only now everyone’s wearing all black, you can’t even have fun anymore with your studied indifference. Crossing the street to walk home—past the Crown, where I danced my ass off to terrible ’80s music and campy projections on white sheets, and everyone stared at me but no one approached.

Past the Eagle, another old building gutted and renovated with a surprising amount of money—usually a leather bar doesn’t have an upstairs cabaret and dance floor, a leather shop with an art gallery, and multiple streamlined spaces on the main floor. Not that anyone in the bar was friendly, but at least  there were nice bathrooms.

And then I go into the convenience store where the register is behind bulletproof glass, my usual place to get an unrefrigerated bottle of water. A trans woman shaking a bit from drugs is ordering knock off perfume, chewing gum, talking on the phone: “I’m on the stroll.” A drug dealer steps in front of me to count out a huge stack of bills.

I get my bottle of water, and then back on the street I’m thinking about all the contrasts—the NPR studio with signs out front that say WARNING DON’T SIT HERE WALL IS UNSTABLE, the members-only jazz club that  I assumed before was a Black space, but when I walk by now it’s all white guys outside, in between sets.

All the businesses that are never open, but the storefronts still advertise what was there before. The rehab center is the fanciest building  on the block—across the street there’s a new art gallery featuring Black artists, in an old brick building.

And I find myself invigorated by the contrasts, the possibility for something surprising to happen—only this is how gentrification works. You look for what you can’t find elsewhere, in neighborhoods where people are having trouble finding anything, and then eventually there isn’t any neighborhood except the one that replaced the neighborhood.

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Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is available via Soft Skull.

When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took her seat on the Supreme Court bench on August 10, 1993, she became the second female to serve on the country’s highest court, joining Justice Sandra Day O’Connor(nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981). In the court’s group portrait from RBG’s first term, the nine justices, posed in front of red velvet curtains, wear flowing black judicial robes. The uniform is a simple but powerful symbol: concealing the individual’s body, it conveys impartiality and the somber, collective responsibility to uphold the Constitution. Justices Ginsburg and O’Connor flank the seven male justices.

There isn’t a dress code for Supreme Court justices—the black robe has been worn over the years out of tradition. For the seven male justices in this 1993 court photograph, the white button-down shirt collars and ties (and one cheerful bow tie) are distinguishing fashion choices. RBG and Justice O’Connor, meanwhile, set themselves apart from their male colleagues, each adorning their uniform with a traditional white jabot—a a frill of lace or other type of fabric fastened at the neck and worn over the front of a shirt or robe.

Their colleagues overseas inspired this sartorial accent—barristers in England have long worn jabots, along with gowns and wigs, as part of their customary courtroom attire. French magistrates wear jabots as well, known there as rabats. Lace was considered a marker of wealth and status, not gender, from its origins until the late eighteenth century, and lace neckpieces, such as jabots and rabats, were traditionally worn by men.

It is worth noting that although Justices O’Connor and Ginsburg accessorized their robes with jabots and collars that were seen as feminine in our time, they were appropriating what was once a symbol of masculine power. Purchasing jabots in the United States, though, proved challenging: “Nobody in those days made judicial white collars for women,” Justice O’Connor remembered. “I discovered that the only places you could get them would be in England or France.”

Their decision to feminize a traditionally male uniform was a radical one. By wearing these decorative accessories, both Justices O’Connor and Ginsburg communicated that a woman could be both intellectually rigorous and feminine. “[Ginsburg’s] collars re-inject the concept of ‘body’ into the disembodying judicial robe,” notes author Rhonda Garelick, “signaling not only the presence of a woman, but by extension, the presence of a biological human body—which demands acknowledgment and consideration.”

This jabot, although more decorative, is reminiscent of the one RBG wore in that first group photograph and in her earlier years on the Supreme Court. The lace collar—with its modern rounded flower petals, leaves, and scrolls—offsets the formality of the crisp, pleated form. Over the years, RBG’s collection of neckpieces expanded considerably in number and style, from classic white jabots like this one to intricate lace pieces to vibrant beaded collars. She acquired some in her travels, and cherished those gifted to her by colleagues, artists, and fans from all over the world.

*

“This is my dissenting collar,” RBG told Katie Couric in a 2014 interview, referring to a limited-edition glass stone necklace with a velvet tie. “It looks fitting for dissent.” Justice Ginsburg received the neckpiece, made by Banana Republic, in a gift bag when she accepted a lifetime achievement award in 2012 at Glamour Magazine’s annual Women of the Year ceremony. A few years later, in an interview with Jane Pauley, RBG elaborated—but just a bit: “This is my dissenting collar. It’s black and grim.”

Justice Ginsburg was known for writing precise and forceful dissents when she disagreed with the majority ruling. “When a justice is of the firm view that the majority got it wrong, she is free to say so in dissent,” she wrote in a 2016 op-ed in the New York Times. “I take advantage of that prerogative, when I think it important, as do my colleagues.”

Dissents become part of case law alongside their majority opinions, and can be referenced in future cases. In the words of an earlier chief justice of the Supreme Court, Charles Evan Hughes, often quoted by RBG, dissents are meant to appeal “to the intelligence of a future day.” RBG’s reading of her incisive dissents from the bench increased with frequency over the years, which she attributed to the ever more conservative makeup of the court: “After 2006, the sight of the tiny black-robed justice rising from the bench wearing her ‘black and grim’ dissenting collar and clutching her papers became a familiar sight,” wrote biographer Jane Sherron De Hart. Ginsburg drafted a hundred and fifteen dissents for the Supreme Court—between her first, in 1994, and her last, in 2020. “Every time I write a dissent,” she told Bill Moyers in her last interview, “hope springs eternal.”

In 2007, when she was the sole female on the Supreme Court—Justice O’Connor had retired the previous year—RBG delivered a sharp dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. In response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in a 5–4 decision that an employee cannot sue for pay discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 unless she brings her claim within a hundred and eighty days of her employer’s discriminatory pay decision, she countered with these words: “Four members of this Court, Justices Stevens, Souter, Breyer, and I, dissent from today’s decision. In our view, the Court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.”

She appealed to Congress to correct the mistake made by her colleagues, and two years later Congress followed through, passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, the first piece of legislation President Obama signed in office—a copy of which RBG framed and hung in her chambers.

She wrote another forceful dissent for the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, in which the majority struck down a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, deeming it unconstitutional. RBG did not mince words: “Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA [Voting Rights Act].” Under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, certain jurisdictions with a history of discrimination were required to submit any redistricting plans to the US Department of Justice for preclearance before they could make changes to voting procedures; this was the key section at play.

Toward the end of her dissent, which was joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, Ginsburg offered this analogy to explain why eliminating the need for preclearance was senseless and shortsighted: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

According to her biographer De Hart, when RBG read the dissent aloud, she quoted Martin Luther King Jr. His words are not included in the written dissent: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But she clarified that it could only bend toward justice “if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion,” ending with “That commitment has been disserved by today’s decision.”

In 2014, she wrote and delivered another eviscerating dissent in response to the Supreme Court’s 5–4 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores. The ruling asserted that a corporation cannot be forced to provide its employees with insurance coverage for contraception when doing so violates the corporation’s religious beliefs. The decision effectively imposed the company’s religious views on its employees. RBG explained that the employers and all who share their beliefs may decline to acquire for themselves the contraceptives in question. But that choice may not be imposed on employees who hold other beliefs. Working for Hobby Lobby…in other words, should not deprive employees of the preventive care available to workers at the shop next door.

She wore the dissent collar in the courtroom but also on significant occasions off the bench, including the day following Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Banana Republic reissued the piece in 2019 for a limited time, now called the Notorious Necklace, donating fifty percent of the proceeds to the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project, which Justice Ginsburg cofounded in 1972. The company reissued it again in 2020, as a tribute to the late justice, this time donating the proceeds until the end of that year, up to a half million dollars, to the International Center for Research on Women.

“Justice Ginsburg’s dissents were not cries of defeat,” Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt reminded mourners when she eulogized RBG in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall. “They were blueprints for the future.”

*

This white beaded collar from Cape Town, South Africa, was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s favorite. Among a variety of milestone moments, she wore it to President Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress in 2009; for his State of the Union, in 2010, when he described the country’s “deficit of trust” in the government and the imperative of fixing it; in 2011, after the Democrats had lost control of the House a few months earlier; in 2012, as Obama geared up for the fall election; and for Pope Francis’s address to the joint session of Congress in 2015—the first time a pope addressed Congress.

It was also the collar she chose to wear for various court group photographs, for her own portrait that hangs in the Supreme Court, for her 2015 portrait as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people, and for Nelson Shanks’s 2012 portrait The Four Justices. Shanks’s epic, large-scale oil painting depicts the four female justices who had served on the US Supreme Court since 1981—Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.

“After Sandra left, I felt very lonely,” Justice Ginsburg remembered, and it was the wrong image for the schoolchildren, particularly, to come in and see this bench with eight men and one very small woman. Now, I sit toward the center by virtue of seniority and Justice Kagan is on my left, and Justice Sotomayor is at my right. We look like we are all over the bench. We are here to stay.

It is fitting that her favorite collar is from South Africa: she had great reverence for the constitution of the Republic of South Africa, ratified in 1996, which she described as “a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights” with an “independent judiciary.”

______________________________

Excerpted from the book The Collars of RBG: A Portrait of Justice by Elinor Carucci and Sara Bader. Copyright © 2023 by Elinor Carucci and Sara Bader. Photographs copyright © by Elinor Carucci unless otherwise noted. Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

I make a martini, Gordon’s or Barr Hill, every night at seven with, in my mind at least, a matador’s formality. I use dense, square ice cubes. Like the pop of a cork exiting a bottle, a martini’s being shaken is one of civilization’s indispensable sounds. The martini is the only American invention, Mencken wrote, as perfect as a sonnet.

I like my martinis shaken rather than stirred because they seem colder and because the ice crystals that swim briefly on the surface are ethereal. I also like mine extremely dry. I was pleased to read, in the 2018 Times obituary of Tommy Rowles, the longtime bartender at Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle hotel, that his secret was to omit vermouth entirely. “A bottle of vermouth,” he said, “you should just open it and look at it.” Modern cocktail orthodoxy is not kind to me, or to Tommy. Stirring, these days, is in, and vermouth is poured with a heavy hand. T. S. Eliot would not have minded. He was a vermouth man, so much so that he named one of his cats Noilly Prat, after his favorite brand. When I do add vermouth I apply Hemingway’s formula, 15:1, in honor of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who liked gin to outnumber vermouth in the same ratio he wanted to outnumber opponents in battle. The toast I make, with whoever is present, is usually the one I learned from the late Caroline Herron, a former editor at the Times Book Review: “To the confusion of our enemies.” The toast Jack Nicholson makes in Easy Rider—“To old D. H. Lawrence”—isn’t bad, either.

“The world and its martinis are mine!” Patricia Highsmith exclaimed in her diaries. Martinis inspire this sort of enthusiasm. Frederick Seidel, in his poem “At Gracie Mansion,” refers to an ice-cold martini as a “see-through on a stem.” The poet Richard Wilbur liked to add “fennel juice and foliage” to his. I’d like to be like Eloise, in the children’s book by Kay Thompson, and keep a bottle of gin in my bedroom. If you want to go broke quickly rather than slowly, drink your martinis outside the house.

Occasionally I’ll mix a vodka martini, recalling that Langston Hughes appeared in a Smirnoff advertisement. Vodka martinis flush out the snobs, who don’t consider them martinis at all. Roger Angell, whose New Yorker essay “Dry Martini” is the best thing I’ve read on the subject, admitted that he and his wife moved from gin to vodka because vodka was “less argumentative.” The best paean to the vodka martini appears in Lawrence Osborne’s amazing book The Wet and the Dry, which is about trying to get a drink in countries where to do so is against the law. Osborne decides that, with its olive, his vodka martini tastes like “cold seawater at the bottom of an oyster.”

Don’t get all excited, as did Kenneth Tynan, and try to take your vodka martini rectally. Tynan had read, in Alan Watts’s autobiography, that this was a good idea. Tynan had his girlfriend inject the contents of a large wineglass of vodka, via an enema tube, into his rectum. “Within ten minutes the agony is indescribable,” he wrote in his diary. His anus became “tightly compressed” and blood seeped from it. It took three days for the pain to abate. “Oh, the perils of hedonism!” he wrote.

I make my first drink on the late side because I like it too much. I also want to prolong the anticipation. Alcohol is, as Benjamin Franklin noticed, constant proof that God loves us. I drink more than most people but less than some. I don’t have an especially big tank; my tolerance is not Homeric. But almost nightly I drink two martinis and, with dinner, a glass or two of wine, without negative effects in the morning. If I have that third glass of wine, my morning at the desk becomes an afternoon at the desk.

Drinking alone doesn’t depress me, the way it does some people. Franklin didn’t recommend it. “He that drinks his cider alone, let him catch his horse alone,” he wrote. But Christopher Hitchens said that solo drinks “can be the happiest glasses you ever drain,” and Norman Mailer, in his novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance, praised what he called “that impregnable hauteur which is, perhaps, the most satisfying aspect of solitary drinking.” When alone, I’ll put on good loud music, of the sort my wife, Cree, does not especially like (jazz or Hüsker Dü) and read magazines and eat cheese until I get tiddly and head for bed. But I prefer companions. When I learn that someone new is coming over, I mentally ask the same questions Kingsley Amis did: “Does he drink? Is he jolly?” Alcohol can bring out the poetry in a person’s soul.

In 2006, Gary Shteyngart, the irrepressible author of novels such as The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Super Sad True Love Story, gave an interview to the Denver-based magazine Modern Drunkard. It’s one of the great interviews of the new century and some enterprising young editor should print it as a chapbook. In the meantime, find it online and send the link to your friends. James Baldwin may have said, “I don’t know any writers who don’t drink,” but that was a long time ago. Shteyngart’s complaint is that writers don’t belly up to the bar with the enthusiasm they once did. “We’re this sterilized profession, we all know our Amazon.com rankings to the nearest digit,” he said. “The literary community is not backing me up here. I’m all alone.” He added, “It’s so pathetic when I think about my ancestors. Give them a bottle of shampoo and they have a party. And here I am with the best booze available.” I’ve tried my best to keep Gary, from my own apartment, company.

“Why didn’t everyone drink?” Karl Ove Knausgaard asked in Book Four of My Struggle. “Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness, it is crashing waves and swaying forests, and the light it transmits gilds everything you see, even the ugliest and most revolting person becomes attractive in some way, it is as if all objections and all judgments are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful.”

Dawn Powell made a similar point in her diaries. “A person is like blank paper with secret writing,” she wrote, “sometimes never brought out, other times brought out by odd chemicals.” In his novel Submission, Michel Houellebecq wrote, “It’s hard to understand other people, to know what’s hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all.” Amis—a copy of his book Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis should be in every home—put it this way: “The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings.”

America’s founders understood all this. Barbara Holland, in her book The Joy of Drinking, reminded her readers that in 1787, the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention “adjourned to a tavern for some rest, and according to the bill they drank fifty-four bottles of Madeira, sixty bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, twenty-two of port, eight of hard cider, and seven bowls of punch so large that, it was said, ducks could swim around in them. Then they went back to work and finished founding the new Republic.” Fifty-five delegates consumed fifty-four bottles of Madeira? Which founder let the side down?

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Excerpted from The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading by Dwight Garner. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023 by Dwight Garner. All rights reserved

The early nineteenth-century press offered readers dismissive accounts of new fashions, specifically scolding women for their “silliness” in acquiescing to “the very inconvenient custom of being without pockets.” Women were more willing to relinquish their free agency as consumers than to challenge fashion, so the charge went. Reporting on the tribulations of one such follower of fashion in 1806, the Weekly Visitor ran a story about a young woman intrigued by the sight of a peddler’s wares. She was hoping to make a purchase but had to admit she couldn’t because she didn’t have any money. The reason? She hadn’t worn a pocket. Desperate for a customer, the peddler was forced to follow the unprepared woman home to collect his payment. A 1789 sketch was less indulgent and forgiving in tone. Titled Fashionable Convenience!!, it depicts a young child asking for money to buy cakes. Mamma replies, “How can you be so vulgar, child, have not I told you a hundred times I never wear pockets!” Women conformed to fashion’s dictates at the expense of convenience, sacrificing even those little but meaningful things like treating their youngsters to sweets.

The mockery got no better for women when they sought a practical alternative in reticules. In carrying reticules, women were essentially exposing their pockets, a once-private accessory. Pockets were previously classified as undergarments, so these displays were an unseemly spectacle to many. An illustration from 1800 makes that connection apparent while ridiculing women for their impractical dress choices. Fashionable ladies are shown in their winter dress wearing floral hats that impede their sight, transparent dresses that show off their nakedness and hardly protect from the cold, and reticules that swing lower and lower down their stockingless legs. The English promptly chose to mispronounce the French word for the fashion accessory and referred to it as a “ridicule,” or, perhaps further punning on its tiny, impractical size, an “indispensable.”

Tie-on pockets came to be associated with the habits of more traditional women, industrious housewives, and “old ladies.” In them housewives carried everything they needed. They were an “honest” and useful receptacle, according to various laments on their demise. A 1796 letter from a mother to her son indicates the politics involved: don’t marry one of those reticule-carrying women, a so-called “Anti-Pocketist,” warns the prominent Mrs. Ridgely of Delaware. To make her case she compares the young man’s sisters with an attractive, “simpering” young visitor who professed herself astonished to find the Ridgely sisters busy sewing. The simpering visitor self-righteously claimed that she never carried scissors, thimble, needle, or thread about her, “for it was terrible in a Lady to wear a pair of Pockets—the French Ladies never did such a thing.” The disuse of tie-on pockets by fashionable women constituted a disavowal of traditional women’s crafts and, for Mrs. Ridgely, a strike against any young woman hoping to marry into her family.

The infatuation with narrow goddess dresses was brief, however, and women’s skirts widened by the 1820s. Some women returned to wearing tie-on pockets (which happily fit again), but many women began to experiment with integrated, masculine-style pockets sewn into dresses at side seams on the hips. For a time, inset pockets fit under the voluminous skirts of the 1850s and 1860s. But this tentative exploration did not gain traction. When bell-shape hoop skirts went out of style, women’s pockets migrated in haphazard and unexpected ways. By the 1870s and 1880s, dresses flattened in the front and skirts were pushed to the back, forming an enormous bustle at the rump. Dressmakers did the best they could and, seeking the area of greatest volume, placed a lone pocket in the folds of the cantilevered bustle.

Artfully tucked under all that drapery, pockets seemed to be buried “in some innermost recess” of one’s being, complained one writer. They were more difficult to locate than “paradise.” One woman reported salvaging material from one of her used gowns: to her surprise, she discovered an entirely unworn pocket so cunningly hidden away that she had never known it was there. Reaching such pockets involved struggle and contortion. Pockets were “practically inextricable” when needed, observed the writer T. W. H. in Harper’s Bazaar in 1893. She reported an exasperating experience involving an impatient horsecar conductor waiting to take her fare. As she twisted around, fumbling at her bustle, trying to locate her money, he and a lengthening line of waiting passengers demanded that she accelerate her search. “How can I possibly hurry up when my pocket is in South Boston?” she indignantly retorted.

T. W. H. further wondered whether contemporary clothing limited the mobility of an entire sex: What if one were to undertake a “statistical inquiry” comparing the pockets of men and women and boys and girls? What would one find? An 1899 New York Times article confirmed the writer’s hypothesis: the “world’s use of pockets” was strikingly uneven. The headline made the situation clear: “Men’s Clothes Full of Them, While Women Have But Few.” The article notes while men’s pockets had “developed, increased and improved,” women were actually “losing ground” after having jettisoned tie-on pockets.

The effects of this lost ground were sketched with more detail in popular fiction. In one of his many adventures in the 1908 book The Wind in the Willows (now considered a children’s tale, although Kenneth Grahame meant it for adults), Toad dresses up as a washerwoman to escape from jail after stealing a motor car. His experience cross-dressing is a “nightmare” because he misses the vest pocket “eternally situated” over his left breast. Unable to access his wallet and thus the money he needs to make his escape, he finds his options severely limited when it matters most. Wearing women’s clothes, Toad observes with surprising frankness, leaves him “unequipped for the real contest.”

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In the meantime, a number of women had begun to “agitate with much earnestness in behalf of the right of women to have and enjoy pockets,” fervently believing, unlike Toad, that a woman was “undoubtedly made to be a pocket-wearing person.” The most sustained attention came from women’s rights activists, who made women’s clothes in general—particularly unwieldy skirts and debilitating corsets, as well as pockets—a political issue. With barely contained irritation, activists published cogent analyses of sartorial inequity. Their demands for “equality in pockets” sound disconcertingly familiar, just like the demands made in the present day.

Women’s rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton was incensed by the contrast between the utterly encumbered woman walking down the street—one hand holding up a majestically sweeping skirt, the other clutching an umbrella, pocketbook, and other small necessaries—and the man who charged down the same street “free as a lark.” A dearth of pockets was one of the “unrecognized disabilities of women,” claimed other progressive women commenting at the turn of the century. It was her “greatest lack.” Feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman pointed out that the design of the material world had marked social implications. Ready access to tools and devices enhanced one’s practical and psychological “preparedness,” giving one the confidence “to meet all emergencies.” Without pockets, women really were “unequipped for the real contest,” as Toad had opined.

In her 1915 sociological study, The Dress of Women, Gilman observed that the pocketless, cheap calico housedresses worn by the majority of housewives and women laboring in other people’s homes neither prepared them nor protected them from wet, dirt, grime, or the fire hazards of the pre-electrified kitchen. Under these conditions, what women should really have been wearing was a protective “leather apron” or a waterproof “oilskin cloak,” she argued. That housewives did not shored up the fiction of happy domesticity while it denied that women were performing actual work. Gilman made a point of outfitting the characters who inhabit her all-female utopia, Herland, in costumes that readied the wearer for any kind of work, including the important business of administering a nation. Emphasizing the wearer’s personhood above their gender, Gilman stepped away from the trouser and skirt binary to propose a garment stripped down to the essentials: a bodysuit “fairly quilted in pockets.” These pockets “were most ingeniously arranged, so as to be convenient to the hand and not inconvenient to the body, and were so placed as at once to strengthen the garment and add decorative lines of stitching.” Gilman’s fiction was not widely recognized in her time, but in it exists a challenge that remains relevant: pockets could be integral to anyone’s clothes in ways that served structural, aesthetic, and practical ends.

Conservative commentators for the most part scoffed at the notion that pockets made a difference, that but for lack of pockets women would be the titans of Wall Street. Such arguments were easily brushed off as so much nonsense, and as one reporter wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1913, suffragists were “now dragging the pocket into the female emancipation problem.” According to these mostly anti-suffragist critics, it seemed as though women had been easily lead astray by an unimportant, irrelevant side issue. Some hoped that women would remain lost in the weeds. Perhaps all those upstart suffragists who “clamor” for the vote should just demand pockets instead—that was the “real grievance,” according to one cynic.

But in the midst of making major social and political advances, women also wanted the flexibility and assurance pockets provided, and they worried about the dangers of acquiescing to the no-pocket tradition in women’s clothes. “By-m-bye, no pockets for the female sect will settle down into hard and fast law,” warned a contributor to a domestic magazine in 1907. The worry seems well-placed: several social traditions were being reconceived as natural by conservative forces opposed to change, from the notion that mothers were not fit for careers to the design of clothes. In a lighthearted but insightful satire, the suffragist Alice Duer Miller pointed out the circular reasoning involved in invoking either tradition or biology to reaffirm the status quo. If women really wanted pockets, they would already have them! Ergo, suffragists must not “fly in the face of nature” by demanding pockets, Miller wrote in her 1915 poem “Why We Oppose Pockets for Women.” If you could claim tailor-made pockets as a natural right, you could do so for just about anything, including the right to vote.

Miller’s humor was lost on all those detractors who felt acute anxiety about maintaining traditional gender roles. Conservative voices tended to identify all suffragists as gender-nonconforming, singling out queer female suffragists in particular as deviant. The lawyer, activist, and president of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, Gail Laughlin, for example, was chided in the St. Louis Star for her refusal to appear in a dress that lacked pockets. “Only on rare occasions does Miss Laughlin take off the mannish garb that she usually wears,” the reporter noted. The journalist mocks Laughlin for being arrayed in a brand-new gown for a federation event and having made it to that point in her life without realizing that such “creations” typically did not offer them. Pointing out her intransigence, the journalist wrote: “Miss Laughlin declined to wear the thing until a pocket was sewed on.”

Anti-suffrage cartoons and propaganda were just as negative, representing suffragists as starkly unattractive. The plot of Charles Hoyt’s 1899 musical comedy, The Contented Woman, involves a wife who runs for mayor against her husband as comeuppance after he rudely tears off a button she has diligently sewn onto his suit, if in the wrong color. The wife’s impulsive retribution, satisfying in the moment, has lasting consequences, according to Hoyt’s play; the image on the cover of the playbill alludes to the changed demeanor of any woman engaged in the “vulgar clamor for rights.” Among the many “horrid” habits she might pick up, the “speechifying” suffragette would need someplace to stash her hands “like a man,” adopting one of his worst mannerisms. But for the suffragette, “pockets mean business,” from being “equipped for the street” to enjoying a gesture considered a bad habit that, because it was defiant, just so happened to be authoritative as well. As one lawyer lamented, she could not approach the jury with the same commanding nonchalance as did her lawyer husband. “Is anything so convincing as that easy attitude a man takes when he plunges his hand deep in his pocket and says, Now, gentlemen of the jury?—”

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From Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close © 2023 by Hannah Carlson. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books.

I think artist Richard Wentworth pre-empted the idea of Instagram through his brilliant series of photographs titled Making Do and Getting By (1974 – present). A hugely influential body of work, his images document a surfeit, ‘ a creativity beyond functionality, a transformative repair.’ He has changed the way we look at the world, and stylistically a large number of diverting Instagram images owe a great deal to him, even those made by Instagrammers who don’t know his work.

Richard writes: Put simply, I think my pictures are unremarkable, except in the way that they talk to each other and remind us that humans read the world every time they look. We sense ‘intention’ and causality in everything we see, the basis for the awful announcements on the Tube for ‘reporting anything unusual.’

I have posted over a thousand images on Instagram. A stream of consciousness that helps hone my eye, alerting me to potential wherever I am. It helps generate new ideas for future artworks. It allows me to rail against social injustice, express political views, and visually indulge: the platform provides a fair bit of cat pilates, found abstracts, backs and undersides of objects, and miscellaneous stuff. I might be a late adopter, but I have made up for lost time, and have had the pleasure of meeting many of my followers in person along the way.

—Cornelia Parker, “A Brush With Instagram” 2023

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The publication of a book is a strange occasion for the author – a mix of disengagement and nervous anticipation. What happens in the long aftermath is another matter. Receiving copies of the Urdu translation, by Fey Seen Ejaz, of A New World from the Sahitya Akademi has given me joy, especially as I wasn’t expecting them.
—Amit Chaudhuri

I went over to see Edna O’Brien tonight.
—Andrew O’Hagan

Weather’s changing.
—Cornelia Parker

The A in Humanity is a bird.
—Kamila Shamsie

Completely love this. Everything you need to know about the Raj in one page from an 1890s anthology of useful Hindustani phrases. Hard to choose a favourite but either The cook is drunk again, The bullet just passed over my head or Why did you allow the goat to come into my house?
—William Dalrymple

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From Seeing Things: The Small Wonders of the World According to Writers, Artists and Others. Edited by Julian Rothenstein. Used with permission from the publisher, Redstone Press.

In London in 1892, everybody—or, at least, everybody who was anybody—was talking about one thing: green carnations. Nobody was sure, exactly, what wearing a green carnation meant, or why it had suddenly become such a deliciously scandalous, dazzlingly fashionable sartorial statement. All anybody knew was that one day, at a London theater, someone important (stories differed as to who exactly it was) wore a green carnation, or maybe it had been a blue one (stories differed about that too).

Green carnations may have had something to do with sexual deviance. They may also have had something to do with the worship of art. And the whole thing somehow had to do with Oscar Wilde, the flamboyant playwright, novelist, and fame-courting dandy who—as he never tired of telling the press—put his talent into his work but put his genius into his life. Wilde lived his life as a work of art (or let people think he did). The affair of the green carnation gives us a little glimpse into how.

One story about what exactly happened comes from the painter Cecil Robertson, who recounts his version in his memoirs. According to Robertson, Wilde was keen to drum up publicity for his latest play, Lady Windermere’s Fan. A character in the play, Cecil Graham—an elegant and witty dandy figure who rather resembled Wilde himself—was ostensibly going to wear a carnation onstage as part of his costume. And Wilde wanted life to resemble art.

“I want a good many men to wear them tomorrow,” Wilde allegedly told Robertson. “People will stare…and wonder. Then they will look round the house [theater] and see every here and there more and more little specks of mystic green”—a new and inexplicable fashion statement. And then, Wilde gleefully insisted, they would start to ask themselves that most vital of questions: “What on earth can it mean?”

Robertson evidently ventured to ask Wilde what, exactly, the green carnation did mean.

Wilde’s response? “Nothing whatsoever. But that is just what nobody will guess.”

It’s unclear how much of Robertson’s story is true. If any large group—including the actor playing Cecil Graham—wore green carnations at the Lady Windermere’s Fan premiere on February 20, nobody in the press commented upon it. That said, the author Henry James, who was in the audience that night, remembers Wilde himself—the “unspeakable one,” he called him—striding out for his curtain call wearing a carnation in “metallic blue.”

Within days, carnations were everywhere. Just two weeks later, a newspaper covering the premiere of another play, this one by Théodore de Banville, reported a bizarre phenomenon: Wilde in the audience, surrounded by a “suite of young gentlemen all wearing the vivid dyed carnation which has superseded the lily and the sunflower,” two flowers that had previously been associated with Wilde and with fashionable, flamboyant, and sexually ambiguous young men more generally.

A little over a week after that, a London periodical published another piece on this mysterious carnation. It is a dialogue between Isabel, a young woman, and Billy, an even younger dandy—heavily implied to be gay—about the flower, which Billy has received as a gage d’amour (the French is tactfully untranslated) from a much older man. Billy shows off his flower to the curious Isabel with the attitude of studied nonchalance: “Oh, haven’t you seen them?…. Newest thing out. They water them with arsenic, you know, and it turns them green.”

The green carnation is something desperately exciting, understood not by ordinary society women but by Brummell-style dandies, shimmering with hauteur. It’s deliciously dangerous, perhaps even a tad wicked; the carnations are colored with poison, after all. It’s also, in every sense of the word, a little bit queer.

The green carnation’s appeal as a symbol of something esoteric persisted. Two years after the premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan, an anonymous author—later revealed to be the London music critic Robert Hichens—published The Green Carnation, a novel that appears to be very obviously based on Oscar Wilde’s real- life homosexual relationship with the much younger Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas.

That relationship would prove to be Wilde’s downfall. In 1895, Wilde would be arrested on charges of “gross indecency” at the behest of Bosie’s influential father and spend two years imprisoned at Reading Gaol.

Wilde would emerge penniless and psychologically shaken, and he died in effective exile in Paris a few years later. Indeed, The Green Carnation, despite being a work of fiction that Wilde didn’t even write, would be presented at his trial as evidence of his moral and sexual degradation. The press, meanwhile, took Wilde’s own propensity for carnations “artificially colored green” as another admission of guilt. By then, it was allegedly common knowledge that such a flower was worn by “homosexuals in Paris.”

In The Green Carnation (the novel, that is) we see Oscar Wilde reimagined as the playwright Esmé Amarinth, the “high priest” of what we learn is the “cult of the green carnation.” Amarinth and his followers are all dandies. Their religion is a passionate worship of the artistic and the artificial, which they believe is superior to the meaningless, empty, and brutal world of nature. Like Rameau’s nephew before them, they are fascinated with originality and the way in which a soupçon of carefully chosen transgression can help them ascend the dull, natural plane and reach a higher, more divine form of existence.

Placing a green carnation into his buttonhole, one of Amarinth’s devotees, Reggie, muses how “the white flower of a blameless life was much too inartistic to have any attraction for him.” Rather, we learn, Reggie “worshipped the abnormal with all the passion of his impure and subtle youth.” Meanwhile, Amarinth predicts that the artificially green carnation will soon be replicated by nature.

Just as Wilde’s seemingly arbitrary decision to promote the green carnation had, within years, transformed the flower into a gay fashion symbol whose origins nobody could seem to remember, so, too—in Amarinth’s telling, at least—would reality change to fit the fantasy. “Nature will soon begin to imitate them,” Amarinth is fond of saying, “as she always imitates everything, being naturally uninventive.”

The Green Carnation is not a very good novel. Oscar Wilde, who was briefly accused of being its anonymous author, declared angrily that he most certainly had not written that “middle-class and mediocre book.” He had, of course, invented that “Magnificent Flower”—the arsenic-green carnation—but with the trash that “usurps its strangely beautiful name,” Wilde had “little to do.” “The Flower,” he concluded, is “a work of Art. The book is not.”

Be that as it may, The Green Carnation, though it is certainly a satirical exaggeration, can tell us much about this strange, new class of young men cropping up not only in London but also in Paris, Copenhagen, and so many other European capitals during the nineteenth century: the dandy. Inheritors of the mantle of Beau Brummell but far more flamboyant in their affect—John Bull would certainly have turned around to look at them in the street—these modern dandies didn’t just live their lives artistically.

Rather, as Hichens’s novel suggest, they had discovered in their obsession with beauty and self-fashioning a new kind of religion, a worship of the unnatural and the artificial as a means of escaping from both the meaningless void of “nature” and the equally meaningless abyss that was modern life.

These dandies believed—or at least made out that they believed—that the highest calling a person could have was a careful cultivation of the self: of clothing, sure, and of hairstyle, but also of gesture, of personality. And behind that belief lay a kind of bitter nihilism, as poisonous as arsenic itself. Nothing meant anything, unless you decided it did. A green carnation could signify homosexual desire, or aesthetic dandyism, or “nothing whatsoever,” depending on your mood and what you felt like conveying to the world that morning.

Self-creation was possible, even desirable, even godlike, precisely because there was no meaning in the world without it. The world was nothing but raw, formless material for the clever and the enterprising to shape to their will. Truth was not objective, something out there in the ether. Rather, it was something for human beings to determine for themselves by shaping the impressions and responses of other people.

“Reggie was considered very clever by his friends,” we learn from Hichens, “but more clever by himself. He knew that he was great, and he said so often in Society. And Society smiled and murmured that it was a pose. Everything is a pose nowadays, especially genius.”

Vivian Grey’s “sneer for the world” had become something every dandy needed to possess.

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Excerpted from Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians by Tara Isabella Burton. Copyright © 2023. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

As a feng shui consultant and design magazine editor and lifelong book obsessive, I am often asked by clients what to do when a collection of books moves from a state of abundance into what feels like a design problem. That moment arrives when people notice they are emotionally overwhelmed by the visual of overflowing bookshelves, or when they have encountered advice elsewhere about how to style shelves and the visual example shelf has only three books on it.

First, let’s all agree that for passionate readers, a personal library is nothing less than a soulful archive of the ever-changing self. We book lovers catalog our transformations, our influences, our ways of being, and our interests through our volumes and develop relationships—perceived or existing—with the people who created them.

Where once a library might have been a way to signal status to visiting society, today, a room full of books tells us a story about us: Where we came from, how we have struggled, what has lifted us, what we know for sure.

You can love everything about books and book culture but still feel a sense of overwhelm when faced with packed shelves. That’s why I often find myself counseling people on how to rethink their displays. Here are some ways that you can integrate a love of books into a life while acknowledging a range of human desires for beauty, balance, and space.

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Let your space dictate what you display.
One place book lovers who have become book collectors can start is by letting their existing space dictate how many books they allow themselves to have. In other words: be a goldfish that only grows to the size of your own fishbowl.

I have learned so much about how to think about collecting from a woman named Lauri Romanaggi, a Portland collector of vintage memorabilia, who lets the spaces she has for display guide how much she allows herself to purchase. For example, if her display shelf is only wide enough for eleven 1950s aluminum mothball canisters (true story), then she can’t acquire any more unless she plans to resell them on her Etsy site. She allows the exact space limitations of her 1934 Tudor home to dictate just how much she can acquire.

It’s a fun challenge, but difficult for most. So when this feels impossible, I remind people that we live in a time when we use social media to tell our stories to the world, but are using our spaces to tell our stories to ourselves. I counsel people to ask themselves: What is the story you are telling yourself about yourself in this space? How might books help you tell this story?

Choose your medium.
Get even more thoughtful about what books you choose to keep. The world of e-readers and digital books has given us so much freedom to curate our libraries towards personal meaning. I learned early on in my relationship with my own e-reader that some types of books read better on screen and don’t need to have a permanent place in my personal space. Their value for me is in the information presented or the quick-read status.

Business books always stay digital for me, as do quirky romances, but literary fiction and design books always gets a hardback room on the shelf. Choose which categories that are important to your life story and honor them in paper in your library. The rest can stay on the Cloud.

Edit your collection.
It can be a fun and freeing exercise to let go of any books that are not integral parts of the story you want to tell yourself about yourself in your space. If you are well-read, you don’t need a library filled with every book you have laid eyes on to know that at your core.

About half a decade ago, I got rid of all but one of my entire collection of tiny German Reclamheftchen. These are small, often bright yellow volumes mass-produced for students of German literature, which I once was. There was a time when they were essential to my identity, but I no longer need them to remind myself of the person I used to be. I saved the volume of classic German poetry, which I love, but passed along the others.

Understanding this opens up a lot of room for curating your own collection the way a museum curator might identify a defining theme for an exhibition. Think of the following themes you could use to cull your collection, or create your own:

⋅ Books from childhood that you loved so much you could recite them
⋅ Stories that changed the way you see the world
⋅ Authors whose work you genuinely fangirl or fanboy over
⋅ Volumes you reference regularly
⋅ Genres you obsess over
⋅ Novels you are eager to read
⋅ Beautiful books
⋅ Expert nonfiction author you consider your tribe
⋅ Narratives that remind you of the formative people in your life

Once you decide what your particular categories are, you will be more open to letting go of any books that do not serve the story.

Consider how you use the space.
As much as we might love thinking about having a dedicated library room, most of us have our books tucked into other spaces. Your library might be in a bedroom, a shared living space, or more likely these days, a work-from-home office. The latter situation can be especially difficult as an overloaded bookshelf can send a strong visual of overwhelm to sensitive folks.

For writers, and other people who work from home, overflowing bookshelves can pose a particular energy suck. A writer looking to publish more might be sending herself the visual cue that there is no room for her on the shelf, or that every story has already been written. Or someone struggling with too many ideas—and wondering which one to actually pursue—might find that packed bookshelves become a visual metaphor for their inability to focus or prioritize the right project.

In these situations, I encourage people to do a quick check-in to ask themselves whether working surrounded by books is helping or hindering them. It all comes down to knowing yourself, identifying how you respond to space, and being open to trying another way. Once people identify their particular problem, the shift happens quickly, and the rest is just moving stuff around.

Assess your needs for visual chatter.
On a similar note, consider just how much visual stimulation you need at all in a space.

Looking at design magazines, it is easy to come away with the feeling that most of us are doing it all wrong when it comes to styling books. In design spreads, books are incorporated as design objects on shelves and are given a lot of room to breathe while sharing space with sculptural objects, small artworks, houseplants, and the odd collected item.

They are chosen to tell a balanced aesthetic story through a unified color palette, varying object sizes, and texturally contrasting materials. The goal for creating a beautiful image is to engage the eye.

In real life, each of us has our own response to visual stimuli based on our unique personality traits and how perceptive we are within spaces. Environmental psychologists have long posited that introverts have needs for more calming spaces, while extroverted humans need much more stimulation from outside of themselves in order to feel good. Wherever you fall on the spectrum, it makes sense to look at your library in light of how much sensory messaging makes you feel your best.

One of my favorite interior designers, Lauren Liess, whose projects favor natural textures and a sense of timelessness, keeps a collection of old R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike novels from her youth on a shelf in her library, with the papers facing front (to avoid the garish neon of the covers). It’s a calming visual that still honors the collection without harshing her mellow, and when she is ready to engage with them, she can just reach in there and any volume will do.

In my own home office, I vary shelves that are packed with ones that have more negative space. I’ve identified that I am one of those people who moves between introversion and extroversion, so a balanced space with some full shelves of books and some devoted to objects feels just about right.

So I store the home design books and magazines right behind me, have two shelves devoted to personal objects of meaning, and then another two shelves above that with more beloved design books. The entire bookshelf carves out a little corner I consider to be my office.

Lean into maximalism.
Then again, if you’ve noticed that the heaviness of full shelves does nothing to your sense of wellbeing or productivity, then consider this: It might be time to go all in on living a life of books and investing in an aesthetic of cozy maximalism. I’m talking about assessing your budget to honor the value books have in your life in favor of building entire rooms of built-in bookshelves.

Surfaces stacked high in piles, favorite novels displayed across a piano, tiny tomes tucked under an occasional chair, books stacked high enough to hold your coffee. Not everyone thrives in a pared-down space, even when it pops up again and again as a dominant image in our visual culture.

If this is you, certainly, lean into it. A stack of coffee table or art books twenty-high makes a glorious coffee table next to your favorite chair. A shorter bookshelf built as a pony wall can help create boundaries between rooms where they don’t exist. A vertical stack of books can feel as classic an addition as a traditional column.

A set of shelves in the cramped space under the stairs might make a person feel supported. A console piled high with books invites visitors to get a peek into your passions and persuasions. A wall of books can feel as engaging a visual as the most charming wallpapers. And a room of books can feel like floating in a sea of everything you love. 

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Find Yourself at Home: A Conscious Approach to Shaping Your Space and Your Life by Emily Grosvenor is available via Chronicle Books.