It’s a June afternoon in 1963 when Cassandra at the Wedding gets on the road in a Riley convertible. The sun is setting on California’s Central Valley. Cassandra Edwards is on her way home to a citrus ranch I imagine to be near Terra Bella where the novel’s author, Dorothy Baker, lived and died shortly after the novel’s completion. Cassandra stops at a bar for a lemon squash, tugs off her driving gloves to use an emergency phone, sluices off dust with an irrigation pipe, and then arrives home in the moth-laced dark. There are glowing lights on the brass wet bar, polished terra-cotta tiles, and herringbone wood ceilings.

This isn’t actually how the book starts. It begins with Cassandra, alone in her Berkeley apartment, wishing she wasn’t. She considers suicide. She considers the futility of academia: “It was such busywork, this whole thing of writing a thesis so that I could become a teacher instead of a writer … I’d really have preferred it the other way around.” She considers her “unsuitable” and unsatisfactory love life. There is the strong suggestion that, while Cassandra feels it’s okay to have flings with other young women at the university, anyone else willing to do so is an inferior sort of person. Cassandra doesn’t want to be part of any club big enough to be a club. She’s got her standards to keep her warm. But, it wasn’t always so lonely for Cassandra. Her twin was always with her. Even apart, they were together. Until they weren’t.

The twins’ paths diverged when Judith went off to Juilliard in New York to see about music and perhaps about individualism. While her sister was falling apart in Berkeley, Judith fell for, and got engaged to, a nice young man, an almost cardboard young doctor. The sisters reconvene at the family ranch for the first time in nine months for the wedding—or in Cassandra’s case, to prevent the wedding.

It isn’t something as simple as taste or money that sets people apart for Cassandra. I felt personally familiar with all her slippery superiority, and I’m not alone. The book has something of a cult following. For Cassandra, a damn fine way to see who’s who is to look at their belongings, every one of which is a “tell.” Cassandra has a Bösendorfer piano. She has a Riley, a beloved make of British racing and touring car, which should tell you everything else you need to know. Deborah Eisenberg, in her illuminating afterword to the NYRB Classics edition, points out that as opposed to all the critique of the American dream in contemporary sixties literature, “the Edwards’ materialism, in contrast—it isn’t one bit empty—the family derives substantial pleasure from their fresh orange juice, the views from their house …”

I spend no small part of my life not only thinking about material objects, but attempting to justify my desires. How easy it is to say “in late capitalism” before one says “I think about those shoes six times a day and I fully believe they will complete my life.” I tried no small number of tactics and therapies—grad school among them—before I hit on a truth that about myself and things. It’s a lifelong love affair. This is also a writer’s problem. We’re looking out for character notes, always. We don’t know much about Vera Mercer, Cassandra’s analyst. She has a “rather handsome piece of luggage—black canvas bound in tan leather, not particularly large but not exactly overnight either.” Mercer is suddenly vivid. She travels alone. Her confidence and tendency to slightly overcommit are her calling cards. A superior person, for Cassandra and for me, is a person who tells an interesting story before you’ve heard them say a word. I am constantly trying to pass my own self on the street. What character am I performing? How complete is the portrait? How clear is the impression?

Cassandra unpacks her weekend bag in her childhood bedroom and an entire self-portrait tumbles out. There are the sneakers, the blue jeans, and the sweater shirts, worn before it was common. It isn’t the cost or the formality that draws Cassandra’s pleasure—it is that she sees personhood in her possessions. Those shoes are just beginning to develop “style.” I remember the dark winter in college when I briefly considered giving up all my exercise attire because I believed that the person I wanted to be didn’t run for health. In fact, maybe that person didn’t have health at all.

It is true that joy can come from having a particular cocktail in a particular apartment or joy can come from finding that your partner’s borrowed sweatshirt perfectly fits into your own wardrobe. But this is not the only way to find joy. Seeking joy in perfection—and it turns out this is obvious—is awfully hard. Chasing the complete portrait, the faultless image, is near impossible. Contradictions make people interesting, and socks aren’t just signals, they also keep your feet warm. There is a section in Cassandra titled “Judith Speaks.” Judith is doing the talking partly because Cassandra has intentionally overdosed on prescription pills, but Judith’s clarity goes beyond mere consciousness. Judith understands something that Cassandra doesn’t. In one beautiful moment Judith, readying for the altar, considers lipstick and decides against it. All her bravery is in that gesture. Hemingway, whom Baker conspicuously admired, described his first wife, Hadley, as taking every decision as a gift. You can only do that if you aren’t always worried about making the wrong one. Reading Cassandra at the Wedding now, I still don’t identify with Judith, but I finally realize that she is right.

Swimsuit

“My old high school tank suit … It still had the Putnam swimming team insignia on the right leg, and it was quite a beautiful color, sort of a blue-grey-green that it has arrived at through season of chlorinated water and full-strength sun”

Cassandra loves her high school bathing suit. She is painfully in need of a bit of solid past. In classic form, Cassandra’s little token has Hemingway-esque aesthetic merit. The suit is good because it is worn and it still holds. I look for this “blue-grey-green” everywhere.

Driving gloves

“It was still hot, but the edge was off, and I sat quiet for a minute while the dust settled. I stripped off my gloves, pulled the belt apart, found coins for the phone …”

As a tribute to her mother, or her grandmother, or her car, Cassandra wears driving gloves when she commands the Riley. I love how idiosyncratic this seems, it’s a telling portrait of the individualism she’s searching for.

Blouse and skirt

“I hadn’t brought much, three skirts, three or four blouses.”

It was difficult to imagine Cassandra in a skirt and blouse until my research unearthed staggering photographs of Joan Didion as a Berkeley student at around the same time. I can imagine both daughters of the Central Valley perfectly attired in the acceptable uniform of the time, knowing it is armor against exactly nothing.

Wedding dress

According to Cassandra, “Nobody ever gets married in anything decent. You wear something you wouldn’t be caught dead in anyplace but your own wedding.” For Cassandra, a bride cannot have fine, restrained taste in wedding dresses because to wed is itself grossly conventional. So when Cassandra and her sister unknowingly pick out the same dress to wear for the wedding, Cassandra is devastated. Cassandra cannot stand the idea that Judith can have a conventional marriage and something of simple restraint. It violates her character notes, it interrupts the sealing in and soldering of her character.

Sneakers

Like her worn-out bathing suit, Cassandra loves her worn-out sweatshirts and sneakers because they attest to the fact of her own existence, like tick marks up a doorjamb tracking a child’s growth. She also likes, I presume, their affront to the conventions of tidiness prized by those who lack her towering “style” and creativity.

“ ‘They were falling apart three years ago. They haven’t even got tongues. Just look at them.’ I looked. ‘To my eye,’ I said. ‘They’ve got real style, or at least they’re beginning to get it.’ ”

Click here to download your very own printable Cassandra paper doll.

Find our other paper dolls here.

Join us this evening, Wednesday, December 2, at 6 P.M. on Zoom, to meet Jenny Kroik and Julia Berick and draw a paper doll of your own.

Julia Berick is a writer who lives in New York. She works at The Paris Review.

Jenny Kroik is an illustrator and painter. She has created covers for The New Yorker, and made illustrations for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Penguin Random House, and more.

ILLUSTRATIONS © JENNY KROIK

There is a sound made by a room full of people at a party. It’s a radio between stations with a stretch and pop and one voice coming into focus and certain stories turning up like bingo balls from the collective burble. I love this sound.

I throw parties for The Paris Review. That’s not what it says on my business card, and I certainly have other duties, but this is one of them. There are equations for judging provisions for a party. The average person drinks x number of drinks, times x number of people divided by glasses in a bottle, bottles in a case, et cetera, et cetera. I sometimes use these equations. I sometimes consult my old receipts, my faithful notes, but there is no keener pleasure or sharper anxiety than standing at the wine shop, bottles of merlot, burgundy, Côtes du Rhône, and Beaujolais in every direction, while trying to picture the crowd, the party, the temperature that day, and the humidity, what they will be wearing, the news that might buoy or sadden them—the mood of three hundred people who, not all at once, but over the course of the night, will be drinking this wine and think—no—feel, the two cases of white (the Sancerre), two of red (the Médoc), a half case of the crémant.

I have grocery lists, too, of course. It would be easy to send an intern to the shop with a list—they are as a rule very capable, too bright for easy errands and yet cheerful when sent on them. But how could I know in advance to tell them to get just a few of those stupidly expensive oranges straight from Italy, still packed in their leaves, which I did not know would be there until I saw them, and which will light up the windowsill and tempt the photographer to take a picture before the density of the crowd makes such a shot impossible.

In other words, I get the flowers myself. I always do.

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about the rich interior life of humans in a metropolis, the minds of people inevitably tangled with each other. The mind we enter most often is that of a woman just past fifty on a day she throws a party in London in June of 1923. A landmark of the Modernist form, few readers will need even that barest of plot summaries: almost everyone through high school knows the novel is a drifting portrait of her conscious and subconscious thoughts interwoven with those of a few figures around her: the man she loved as a young girl, her husband, a shell-shocked young man encountering a very different London, that man’s wife.

Clarissa Dalloway is given a relatively small sphere of agency—not because she was written by a man who doesn’t care about her, or because she is an older woman without enough “market appeal,” but because Woolf draws her like it was. As we know from our grandmothers, mothers, and—god help us—our own lives, women are often cast as the supporting figures to men. Virginia Woolf herself is famous in part for escaping, and drawing attention to, this fate. Clarissa excels then with what she has: parties, memories, loyalties, “a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly,” the florist “who thought her kind,” and her servants, who respect her so much that, when taking her parasol, they “handled it like a sacred weapon.” Only on this recent reading of Mrs. Dalloway did I learn that Woolf wrote the novel not from the tangle of London itself but from the suburbs where it was deemed safer for her mental state. She was writing a love letter to London, from just outside its power.

Woolf’s famous protagonist, Clarissa, thinks of her identity in part as being “Mrs. Dalloway, not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.” She has in one hand the domesticity of her present and in the other the romanticism of her past. The past is painful and potent, because so much of her future was then unknown. It seems to me that Clarissa has less regret and more nostalgia for the deliciousness of being undecided, complex, messy. Peter Walsh is the not-quite-forsaken suitor of Clarissa’s not-quite-forsaken youth. He insults her when they are young by telling her, “She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her (she had cried over it in her bedroom), she had the makings of a perfect hostess, he said.”

The orchestration of lives is her medium and even Peter admits that if this is her métier, she excels: “behind it all was the network of visiting, leaving cards, being kind to people; running about with bunches of flowers, little presents; so-and-so was going to France—must have an air cushion.” There were places to record this kind of information: women used to keep books filled with menus served and seating charts, who mustn’t be seated with whom, who couldn’t tolerate that one’s wife, whose guest that man was previously. I do this still, the record-keeping and the “running about.” I don’t always get it right, but when I do it feels like attaining knighthood. When the work is done well, it isn’t conspicuous. Very good hostessing is often invisible.

I do have, as I said, other duties at the magazine. I don’t only find florists in L.A., collect fir and pine branches before the Christmas party, place a particularly handsome man at the door, adjust the lights, keep up with the bartenders. And yet, in my role as a party-thrower, I have read Mrs. Dalloway quite carefully, checking for confirmation, affirmation, or an icy snub from Woolf. But there isn’t a moral in Mrs. Dalloway. It isn’t at all clear that Clarissa would have been happier with Peter, or as a poor women living for principles alone (had she been able to live as a wealthy woman alone, that might have been a good option, but that is a different story). And it is a great pleasure to bring people together. At my first party, or perhaps my second, I sent a text message to someone who would safeguard the emotion for me: “Remind me that I had a body high. Remind me that I couldn’t imagine it would be ecstasy.”

It is partly by habit and partly my necessity, since I tinker till the last moment, to step into the office bathroom to change just as the party begins. If I plan it right, I don’t hear my name at all. No one notices I’ve slipped away because everything is ready. I’m not the center of the party—I’m the corral at the edges. There is the low music, which will later be muted by revelry, the sound of the staff playing pool—the workday dissipating as the click of the balls turns into the chatter of a filling house. Then I’m ready and I’m dressed and, if I’ve done a particularly fine job transforming, I get a nod from the bartenders as I pass them and it is time to begin. Not at the top of the stairs, perhaps, but at a threshold.

THE GREEN  DRESS

Before the party, there is always a flapping loose end or two, asking to be tied down, staked. One is always something of vital importance and the other is always something very minor, often to do with attire. And, as is the way with things, they always seem of about equal importance for a moment or two. On the day of her party, Clarissa sits to sew up a tear in her favorite green dress: “Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly to the belt.”

THE WHITE FROCK 

Clarissa looks back on a summer in her twenties, “early in the nineties.” Thirty years later Clarissa can “remember going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy (now the old feeling began to come back to her, as she took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing-table, began to do her hair), with the rooks flaunting up and down in the pink evening light, and dressing, and going downstairs, and feeling as she crossed the hall ‘if it were now to die ‘twere now to be most happy.’ That was her feeling—Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seaton!”

THE COAT

While researching clothing for Clarissa, I found a photograph, a striking snap of Woolf from June 1926, the summer after she published Mrs. Dalloway. There she is in silk and velvet, as the English summer allows—a little skeptical but wise beyond her years. I gave her coat to Clarissa.

THE FLOWERS

Clarissa’s immortal excursion: to buy the flowers. There she is on a busy day, “snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness.” During the day, Clarissa is alive to the possibility that her hat is wrong and that she perhaps could care a little less for gloves. “She had a passion for gloves.”

THE HOSTESS

The secret is that, even during the party itself, the hostess longs most to leave because she cannot. Since I am not exactly the hostess I can leave, for a moment or two. I yearn to hear that the ice is out, that we need more lemonade. I find a friend, if I can in the crush, and duck out to breathe a minute on the stairs. I shake the sweat out of my hair, buy twelve bags of ice and a pack of gum past midnight. Every time, the men at the deli joke gently: “having a party?” Every time, I smile.

Click here to download your very own printable Clarissa paper doll

Find our other paper dolls here 

Julia Berick is a writer who lives in New York. She works at The Paris Review.

Jenny Kroik is an illustrator and painter. She has created covers for The New Yorker, and made illustrations for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Penguin Random House, and more.

Illustrations © Jenny Kroik

When I was a girl, I had a friend.

Some years I used honorifics and some years she was my only friend and there was no need. There was a high school classmate of ours who, for a while, thought we were the same person, and there was another who thought we were lovers. I’ve told the story of the end of that friendship so many times that it has almost lost meaning. At first, telling the story stretched out all the space between us that hadn’t been there before. Then, it just began to collapse it.

One time, our senior year, I told the story to another girl in the winter darkness of my suburban street. Her car was sporty. The parking brake was a pedal by her feet. When I told the story she lifted one long leg and smashed that parking break to the floor.

The parking brake and the totality of being a teenager made me think it was a good story—a high school band put it in a song. From time to time, in the fifteen or so years since, I’ve taken that story out again and held it up to the light. Frances Ha appeared on the scene, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, Lady Bird, Conversations with Friends, all stories about female friendship and its fucking sharp points. I recognized elements of myself in each of them, and it quieted all that teenage rage. I was not the only girl to have her heart broken by her best friend. But I hadn’t yet read Sula.

Toni Morrison is a writer who doesn’t write to teach a lesson, as she has said, but Sula taught me one anyway. Sula seems to be about dependence: womanhood’s dependence on motherhood, a mother’s dependence on her children, a woman on her lover’s attention. But it also about the way a friendship—a very close one—is a relationship built out of desire, independent from all rules.

The novel blooms and blooms: the grandmothers behind the two mothers behind their daughters. It’s the story of life in one black neighborhood, the Bottom, in rural Ohio from 1895 to 1965. In 1922, Sula and Nel find each other: “Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on.” One day, a game they are playing leaves a boy drowned in the river. The secret, held in the sanctity of friendship, becomes part of their inseparable bond. When the girls grow up, Nel marries and Sula leaves town for college and whatever else she can find. “Had she paints or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendously curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and reoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. Like any artist without no art form, she became dangerous.” Nel, meanwhile, settles into the expectation of the town. Unfulfilled and fabulous, Sula returns. She arrives arranged in a sophisticated traveling costume the likes of which the town has never seen. She retires, eventually, to a plain yellow dress but the point is made. Sula has journeyed beyond the Bottom and this new version of her has no use for the town’s careful social codes. The rumors swirl, about how she is never ill, about how she comes to church without underwear.

She returns for Nel, but the arithmetic of best-friendship comes out wrong. “She had clung to Nel as both the self and the other only to discover that she and Nel were not one and the same thing.”  Sula learns her terrible lesson two ways: first, she sleeps with Nel’s husband, thinking their friendship is stronger than her curiosity. It isn’t. Then, alone for perhaps the first time, she develops an attachment to a man who wants none. This final break doesn’t kill her, but something does. She is dead—less than four pages later.

Perhaps she was dead to Nel and could therefore live no longer. Perhaps there is a tiny sliver of bitter revenge in Sula’s death. Or perhaps she has to die for Nel to realize the truth about friendship. To learn the lesson that the impossible female friend will always be held in the impossible balance. Only on her deathbed can Sula speak with full honesty: “If we were such good friends, how come you couldn’t get over it?” It takes Nel twenty-five years, but she finally hears Sula—hears her loud and clear and wonders, really wonders, what the answer is.

If friendship is all we say it is, if friendship in girlhood is the mingling of two souls, companionship that no adult, no lover, can ever match, then how can any transgression be unforgivable? Why isn’t the friendship sovereign over all possible faults? All these years later, I’m still wondering, “How come I couldn’t get over it?”

*

The purple dress:

On a particularly fateful day in her twelfth year, Sula wears a purple and white dress with a belt. Later in the book, the grammar of memory gets confused, the words mingle and redistribute, and it is as if Nel were the one wearing the dress, “Standing on the riverbank in a purple-and-white dress, Sula swinging Chicken Little around.”

The return:

Sula’s return to the Bottom after her time away is one of literature’s most stylish entrances. “She was dressed in a manner that was as close to a movie star as anyone would ever see. A black crepe dress splashed with pink and yellow zinnias, foxtails, a black felt that with the veil of net lowered over one eye.”

The red leather case:

Morrison carefully catalogues each item Sula has with her when she arrives back in town, including “a red leather traveling case, so small, so charming—no one has seen anything like it ever before, including the mayor’s wife and the music teacher, both of whom had been to Rome.”

The yellow dress:

Within just a few days of returning, Sula has settled into “wearing a plain yellow dress the same way her mother, Hannah, had worn those too-big house dresses—with a distance, an absence of a relationship to clothes which emphasized everything the fabric covered.” There is an easy dichotomy to draw between women who want attire to complement their figures and women who want their figures to defy their clothing. When rumors begin to circulate that Sula wears no underwear to church, it is inevitable. No apparel can contain her body.

The foxtails:

Just as my friend and I were beginning to drift apart, I arrived late at a party where she had been for some time. Knowing the host well, I let myself in and went to hang my coat. There were a variety of other coats already, many I knew well, the gathering was small, the guests were intimates. And yet there on the pegs was a coat I didn’t recognize. It was casually lavish, I remember it being furred, though maybe it wasn’t. I remember it being dark. It had to be my friend’s coat, and yet it was a piece of her I didn’t know.

Click here to download your very own printable Sula paper doll

Find our other paper dolls here 

Julia Berick is a writer who lives in New York. She works at The Paris Review.

Jenny Kroik is an illustrator and painter. She has created covers for The New Yorker, and made illustrations for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Penguin Random House, and more.

illustrations © Jenny Kroik

You see her sometimes on the way to work. On the train, or on line at the coffee shop where, though you are late, you have stopped for coffee. She is wearing what you ought to have chosen that morning: something much more cool or much more practical or much more elegant than you. Her bag is from a shop you’ve heard about but haven’t gotten to yet or can’t afford. She is in Boston or San Francisco or Atlanta or L.A., but she is perhaps most indigenous to New York City. She is real and she is also a figment of your imagination. 

As I carried a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca into a coffee shop recently, a woman stopped me to say it was one of her “favourites.” We spoke about it in a way that caught the attention of another woman in line, and the second woman explained the plot to the third. She told her that the book was about a lot of things, but that it was really about a house. As someone who has worked as a bookseller, I have gotten good at describing books I’ve read, and those I haven’t, to customers in four to nine words (which is as long as a person is willing to spend hearing about a book they probably aren’t going to read). To say that Rebecca was about a house seemed like the kind of stretch it would be to say Hamlet is about a marriage, and yet it is. It is about inhabiting a role you can’t quite play—the more I think about and read about Rebecca, the more I think this woman was right. It is about a house, only the house is a metaphor for a woman. Really, it’s a book about imposter syndrome. 

Du Maurier’s 1938 best seller opens on a timid, painfully shy woman who goes to Monte Carlo, where she is a paid companion to an older American woman. Here she meets a widowed, sophisticated aristocrat, Maxim de Winter (a name dreamed up for sighs), and he asks her to marry him and return to his beautiful estate in Cornwall—but the fairy-tale ending is only the beginning of the story. The ever-after splinters when the unnamed protagonist finds that traces of Maxim’s dead wife, Rebecca, are everywhere: Rebecca has authored the menu that is followed by the kitchen each day, she is in the fiercely confident handwriting on the household labels, in the beautiful decoration of the enchanting rooms, in the memory of a blind dog, in the memory of the tenants on the estate and the villagers in the village. In every action, our protagonist feels inferior to the beautiful, gracious Rebecca. Rebecca’s shoes, as pointed out to the new Mrs. de Winter by the housekeeper, are literally too slender and elegant for anyone else to wear.

Our protagonist doesn’t gain confidence or learn to dress herself better. She doesn’t become a better hostess or more confident in advising the servants. There is a twist but no transformation. The book is a thriller but it depends on what thrills you, and (fair warning to all those who haven’t yet read it) I’m about to spoil it. The twist of Rebecca is that Rebecca is not someone you should aspire to be. Rebecca, it turns out, is a bitch.

And Maxim, he never loved Rebecca at all—in fact, he killed her. He doesn’t want “a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls,” he wants our dowdy protagonist, all lank hair and bitten nails and a clumsy mackintosh. Our protagonist is never reborn into a woman of elegance; she is just relieved to be loved the way she is. 

Imposter syndrome is the psychosis du jour of millennials, women especially. A trend forecaster in the Times recently wrote about how in trends, thesis is followed by antithesis. We spent the first decade of our adulthood being told we were entitled, and so what could be more reasonable than to now become consumed by self-doubt. In the surreal spring weeks during which I trained alongside my impossibly cool predecessor for what is now my job at The Paris Review, the sensation was particularly intense. It wasn’t just the young women who preceded me in my role, it was that New York City, generally, and The Paris Review, specifically, are absolute castles both, and I dare you to find the woman who steps inside and thinks, Mine. 

When I read the book, Rebecca is the one I aspire to become, not the second Mrs. de Winter. I don’t dream of discovering that the standards I’ve set for myself are too high, that I, imperfect and unglamorous, have been lovable all along. My greatest desire is to inhabit the unachievable with the wink and the drag, to slip on Rebecca’s elegant shoes and fool them all. The nightmare for me is not so much to be haunted by Rebecca, but to be the narrator who lies in bed, as the second Mrs. de Winter does in one scene, knowing that a better woman would jump to her feet and pick out a dress, yet is paralyzed by her own shortcomings. To me, it is one of the most sickening passages in all of literature. Because, for me, the jury is still out. Which Mrs. de Winter am I? 

My mother likes to say that Rebecca was my grandmother’s favorite book. I wonder—did she dream of becoming Rebecca, too? 

The Ghost:

For most of the novel, Rebecca is a floater in the eye of the protagonist, superimposed rather than directly seen. Then the second Mrs. de Winter stumbles into the bedroom of the first. Mrs. Danvers, literature’s second-most sexually frustrated housekeeper, has kept the room more like a holy relic than a crypt. Here is Rebecca’s dressing gown and her slippers. Here is her nightdress, “thin as gossamer, apricot in color,” inside a nightdress case (the delight of a nightdress case made my heart pound more than the sinister azalea smell of the closets).

The room is beautiful, as are the things in it, but many of du Maurier’s descriptions of the space are vague. The clothing, on the other hand, is almost scientifically described, with a concentration of detail that is dizzying.

The Hairbrush:

Perhaps the closest thing to erotica in Rebecca are the dead woman’s hairbrushes. Mrs. Danvers speaks reverently of the ritual: “I’ve come into this room time and time again and seen him, in his shirt sleeves, with the two brushes in his hand. ‘Harder, Max, Harder,’ she would say, laughing up at him, and he would do as she told him,” before passing the brushes to “Danny” herself to take over.

The Red Dress:

In her rapturous monologuing tour of Rebecca’s wardrobe, Mrs. Danvers pauses at the red dress. “I believe Mr. de Winter liked her to wear silver mostly. But of course she could wear any color. She looked beautiful in this velvet. Put it against your face. It’s soft isn’t it?” This wine-colored velvet dress wraps Rebecca in the solid material of the aristocratic past with the svelte cut of the shockingly modern future.

The Riding Outfit:

Rebecca was a commanding horsewoman. She won races against her cousin (the rakish Jack), and was painted on horseback for an award-winning portrait. The second Mrs. de Winter, of course, doesn’t even know how to ride. Before the thirties, women rode sidesaddle, a tradition that began when Princess Anne rode all the way across Europe with a twist in her back to preserve her virginity for her marriage to Richard II. Rebecca’s era marked the widespread acceptability of women riding astride, and Rebecca, needless to say, would have dominated in either position.

The Spaniel:

Jasper is the first and maybe only creature at Manderley who loves the second Mrs. de Winter. I, who have always relied on the kindness of dogs, can’t fault either of them for that.

The Sailing Outfit:

Rebecca dies in slacks. Both Mrs. Danvers and Max make a point of mentioning this: “she was wearing slacks of course and a shirt when she died,” and from Max: “hands in the pockets of her trousers. She looked like a boy in her sailing kit, a boy with the face like a Botticelli angel.” Is it the same as dying with your boots on? In his novel Underworld Don DeLillo describes a woman named Amy who was “tall and competent and looked good in jeans.” Amy is but a footnote in the 838-page-long book, but I think about her all the time. The rest of the description is about how capable she is, but it’s redundant—we already know she looked great in jeans. Was it Rebecca’s slacks that put Max over the edge? The boyishness? The self-sufficiency? Max shoots her and stages her drowning in a sailing accident, but her fans are unconvinced. The sea could never undo Rebecca.

The Costume Ball:

Rebecca’s costume for the final ball she hosted at Manderley becomes a pivotal plot point in the novel. The second Mrs. de Winter briefly feels happy in the costume she’s chosen for her debut Manderlay ball, before she realizes she has committed a fatal error—she is wearing exactly what Rebecca wore the year before. The quick morality tale of the book might be to love yourself as you are. But to the careful reader, Rebecca wore the costume best, wears every costume best, because she is better at masques than anyone.

Click here to download your very own printable Rebecca paper doll

Julia Berick is a writer who lives in New York. She works at The Paris Review.

Jenny Kroik is an illustrator and painter. She has created covers for The New Yorker, and made illustrations for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Penguin Random House, and more.

If you want more, please enjoy the accompanying Franny paper doll below:

© Original illustrations by Jenny Kroik

Before I was a tomboy or a clotheshorse or a loser or a teenager, I was a bookworm. In that happy valley before puberty, my greatest bliss was to be given both a book and the permission to play dress-up all at once. I had a plain white trunk for my robes and silks, my wings (several kinds), my swords and my purses. Dressing up as my favorite characters was a bit of magic, and, even today, I still read novels like a costume designer. I can tell you that the best part of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is Edna Pontellier’s peignoir. I think a lot about Moriah’s underwear in Play It As It Lays (blue silk from a hotel shop) and Hana’s sneakers in The English Patient (slightly too big). How could I not? They are the only shoes she wears. Clothing means something about our destination, our origins, our field, our desires. Everyone in a novel is dressed with intention by their author.

I’ve paired with the illustrator Jenny Kroik to bring you what us bookworm-clotheshorse child-adults have always wanted: literary paper dolls. We’ve begun with J.D. Salinger’s Franny, but stay tuned for more. Print them, share them, dress them, and please, please play with them. There’s a link to your own printable paper doll at the bottom of this post. You, too, can take Franny from one edge of her breakdown to the other by taking off her smart traveling outfit and fitting her with a pale blue cashmere afghan. We who shop late nights in marketplaces online might find satisfaction in printing out a robe and pinning it literally onto not just a figurine but to a character, an author, a time period. At the very least, this will look great on your desk.  

Reopening Franny and Zooey in your thirties is just like opening the diary your mother thoughtfully mailed to you after she found it in the box she’s been trying to get out of the basement. You almost can’t bear to look, but you can’t bear not to look, either. My most love-worn of J.D. Salinger’s novels, Franny and Zooey, is a story in two chapters. The first chronicles Franny’s emotional breakdown as she visits her boyfriend, Lane Coutell, during the “big Yale game.” The second follows the efforts of one of Franny’s older brothers to bring her out of her depression, which, he believes, was brought on by the overly precious environment of the Glass household: seven children of two vaudeville actors who have spent their lives winning fame on a radio show and pursuing enlightenment. As fables for the twenty-first century go, Franny and Zooey has aged just fine. All over New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and L.A., children are downing turmeric milk and meditation apps, buying salt lamps by the cave-full. But the difference is that Franny and Zooey was written in a moment when questioning the pursuit of the American dream was still novel and risqué, and there was no Buddhist mantra emanating from every set of AirPods. Salinger’s characters have died for their want of salvation and everyone’s apartment is prewar. Franny exists in the painful, beautiful first blush of adolescence. 

Sociologists will tell you teenagers were invented in the late forties. They were created partly by postwar economic security and they questioned the excess from which they were hatched. Even as they were molded by advertisers and magazines, their skepticism remained an essential posture. When Salinger wrote Franny and Zooey in the mid-’50s, young people ages thirteen to nineteen, with disposable income, time, access to cars, phones, and the freedom to roam without chaperones, were only just beginning to be spoken about as a group whose fickle tastes and desires were distinct from those of adults. Salinger was one of the first bards of the teenage saga and Franny is one of his finest heroines. Last year, when Sally Rooney’s books began to appear to critical acclaim, comparisons to Salinger were inevitable. Like any good perpetual teenager, I was acutely skeptical. What could “Salinger for the snapchat generation” possibly mean? But both authors write so accurately of adolescence and its discontents. After rereading and rethinking Franny and Zooey, the meaning settled right in. The New Yorker’s Lauren Collins writes, “One of the unusual pleasures of Rooney’s novels is watching young women engage in a casual intellectual hooliganism, demolishing every mediocrity that crosses their paths, just for the fun of it,” which could describe Salinger’s Franny as much as Rooney’s Frances. Collins also concludes that Rooney’s postrecession identity might figure more prominently than her millennial identity, but rereading Salinger argues differently. Defending your island against the very tides that created it is as old as the teen herself. In Rooney’s first book, Conversations with Friends, Frances tries on the expensive coat of her older lover and admires how vulnerable she looks in it, all the while rejecting both the expense and the vulnerability. Franny, too, tries on adulthood hoping to find a home there, despite despising those who embody it. I’m officially in my thirties, but the frustration feels familiar to me. Perhaps you never fully put away childish things.

Franny is in pieces about what people wear. All the Glasses are—they’re New Yorkers, after all. Franny’s observations of other women are canny and knowing: “The Bennington-Sarah Lawrence type looked like she’d spent the whole train ride in the john, sculpting or painting or something, or as though she had a leotard on under her dress.” But about Franny herself we know only that she’s got a sheared raccoon coat with a wrinkled silk liner. Raccoon coats were just coming back into style in the late fifties as a retro nod to flapper exuberance. That’s our girl, a wrinkled liner but it’s silk. It’s the wrinkles that first frustrate Lane, her boyfriend, and it’s one of the ways we know he’s no good.

Lane thinks of Franny as “not too categorically cashmere sweater and flannel skirt,” but in truth Franny isn’t categorically anything. Dear Franny—she can’t stand to be. We’ve put her in a slightly modern sweater set based on knits Jackie Kennedy wore in Vogue with her sister in 1955.

After her collapse, Franny rides things out on the couch at home. Apparently, “Mrs. Glass, who did some of her most inspired, most perpendicular thinking on the threshold of linen closets, had bedded down her youngest child between pink percale sheets, and covered her with a pale-blue cashmere afghan.” It’s a certain kind of logic, that the right set of sheets can set you right. It’s a logic that says color and material matter, what you are wearing matters and you won’t be the only one who notices, even at home on your own couch.

Bloomberg Glass is one of the best cats in literature. Making his star entrance midscene, Bloomberg is at first concealed under Franny’s afghan, but “under the stimulus of Zooey’s investigating finger,”  “abruptly stretched, then began to tunnel slowly up toward the open country of Franny’s lap.” He is a “very large mottled-gray ‘altered’ tomcat” and you can have him both ways—tucked inside the collar of the afghan or out in the open country.

On the couch, having been woken by her brother Zooey, she “sat up a bit and, with one hand, closed the lapels of her dressing gown. It was a tailored tie-silk dressing gown, beige with a pretty pattern of minute pink tea roses.” Referred to as the last word in dormitory chic fatale, Franny’s dressing gown gets caught, like Franny, in a tug-of-war between well-groomed adulthood and a sick day from childhood.

When beaded with the perspiration of her spiritual crisis, Franny rejects Lane’s handkerchief with the certainty that she has a Kleenex somewhere in her bag. “Her handbag was a crowded one. To see better, she began to unload a few things and place them on the tablecloth, just to the left of her untasted sandwich. ‘Here it is,’ she said. She used a compact mirror and quickly, lightly blotted her brow with a leaf of Kleenex.” Later, “she cleared everything—compact, billfold, laundry bill, toothbrush, a tin of aspirins, and a gold-plated swizzle stick—back into her handbag.”  I knew it was down there somewhere, I say about every little thing in my bag, convincing no one.

Click here for your very own printable Franny paper doll

Julia Berick is a writer who lives in New York. She works at The Paris Review.

Jenny Kroik is an illustrator and painter. She has created covers for The New Yorker, and made illustrations for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Penguin Random House, and more.