24 books like It's All about the Dress

I find midcentury fashion memoirs inspiring because they’re filled with stories of strong, self-realized women who really managed to have it all. This one by Bettina Ballard, French editor for American Vogue in prewar Paris, goes one better because it also offers heartbreaking commentary on the war.

Alongside observations about great designers like Chanel and Dior, Ballard writes stirringly of the tragic, gruesome fates that befell many in her world and the courageous way some resisted the Germans to save their art form, couture. Vogue tries to bring her back to New York, but she swiftly returns to Europe as a Red Cross volunteer—albeit one who sneaks non-regulation eveningwear into her trunk. When she finally goes home to marry (for the second time), she mentions it in an aside.  

I read this 1963 novel in college, adored it, and have re-read it many times since.

The book opens in 1933, as a group of eight women are graduating from Vassar during the Great Depression, and one announces her engagement. From there, the book functions almost like a work of journalism, following their lives until they gather again for the bride’s funeral in 1940, just as America is on the verge of war. In between, their stories demonstrate the different possibilities for women during a time of enormous social change (the period parallels the Makioka Sisters).

McCarthy’s writing has great range: while describing some figures, she’s biting and acerbic; with others, she’s empathetic, and they all seem very real, even today. I’m still looking for a love story like Polly’s.

I read this book in college and still recall it vividly.

A family seeks to marry off its daughters in prewar Japan, but while the world around them is evolving, they cling to tradition, insisting that the betrothals and marriages must happen in order. The youngest has a suitor and is eager to move forward with her life, but the first in line isn’t interested in being matched or hurried, which provokes a cascade of crises. Although the goal is finally achieved, there’s no sense of triumph.

Even in translation, the story is rich, complex, and naturalistic, and the characters seem so real that I once dreamed about encountering them on the street.

To me, this slim novel is perfect, and perfectly constructed.

The narrator spends it obsessing over a single question–why did my sister marry an older, wealthy, boring man?–and doesn’t figure out the answer till the end. And in retrospect, it’s obvious. Meanwhile she also mulls over the options for young women circa the early 1960s in an England that’s transforming dramatically: Do I marry? Stay single? Let my life drift?

My parents bought the Penguin paperback when we lived in London in the late 1960s for a year, when the city was really swinging. I began reading it at 10 and was transfixed by the glimpse it offered into adulthood, and I have re-read the same paperback many times since.

Elizabeth Taylor—not to be confused with the actress of the same name—has been called ‘the unsung heroine of British twentieth-century fiction.’ I wholeheartedly agree, and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is Taylor at her sublime best. It’s the tale of an elderly woman, wealthy but recently widowed, who’s faced with a choice: "Do I spend my last days in a care home—or check into a grand hotel?" She opts for the latter and finds herself among a group of fascinating characters, each as eccentric as she herself. 

Insightful about the sadness and loneliness of ageing, this book did not make me feel despondent about growing older. On the contrary, it showed me that love, happiness, and a sense of adventure can be ours at any age, if we’re willing to take chances and open our hearts to others.

Love, desire, falling too passionately for a married man, the world may be different from when this book was published in 1936, but the angst, the joy, the terror, and the hard choices remain the same.

An intelligent, capable, charismatic woman falls for a handsome, upper-class man, tantalizingly just out of her social and emotional reach. Will he leave his wife and the easy security of a stable relationship? Will love trump duty? Life-changing decisions reach a climax in the office of a back-street abortionist, where the snare of passion and its potentially destructive consequences are laid bare.

Written in lyrical and episodic prose, this is a truly timeless and memorable read.

Anton, a former columnist for The Japan Times, grew up in New York City, one of three children raised solely by an African American father. (Her mother was institutionalized due to mental illness.) She studied dance with Martha Graham, modeled for the pages of LOOK magazine at a time when African American models were few and far between, and copy-edited for Joseph Heller. Later, she traveled to Europe where she met Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton when she interviewed to be their house-sitter in Gstaad, fell in love and gave birth in Denmark, then later journeyed overland from Europe to Asia with her childhood friend and future husband, Billy. Any one chapter of her life could have been the basis for an entire book. Anton is an engaging storyteller with an exceptional story -- an unbeatable combination. I highly recommend this memoir to anyone interested in Japan, multicultural families,… show more.

I adore this collection of women’s short stories, all written in the forties and fifties. It gives a great scatter-gun indication of the mood and moral atmosphere of the times.

The mixture contains stories by familiar writers – Daphne du Maurier’s "The Birds" is here – as well as writers who’ve been largely forgotten, like Frances Bellerby, whose delicate story "A Cut Finger" made me cry.

Reading short stories makes a welcome change from the journey of a novel, especially when I’m busy. One a night makes a perfect bedtime treat. 

Though her style has always struck me as danger-close to tabloid and disjointed, nobody ever said those traits couldn't result in coffee-through-nostrils hilarity and knockout via punchline.

Fisher's particular brand of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll certainly didn't help with her bipolar management. All the same, her unhinged lifestyle did deliver a bevy of dramatic and somewhat instructive anecdotes.  

She captures the chaos with such wit and bite in Postcards from the Edge and Shockaholic, but if you have to choose just one book, go with Wishful Drinking.

In 1906, a handsome scoundrel named Chester Gillette murdered his girlfriend, Grace Brown, by rowing her out onto a secluded mountain lake, whacking her with a tennis racket and pushing her overboard.

Why? Grace was a lowly factory girl, and her inconvenient pregnancy threatened to rain on Chester’s skirt-chasing parade. I was sucked into this poignant tale, having camped and canoed in upstate New York where the crime took place. I even teared up as I imagined what it felt like for poor Grace, cast to the bottom of a lake by the young man she thought was going to marry her.

This carefully researched non-fiction account is an irresistible combination of detective story and romantic drama.