BOOKS
BIOGRAPHIES
I'm the author of A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and Her Life in Fashion, Art, and Letters (Atria, 2008), a biography of the Irish-born editor of the American edition of Harper's Bazaar from 1934 through 1958. Carmel was a key figure, not just in fashion, but in the cultural life of Europe and the United States.
Carmel was an outsize personality -- funny, brilliant, imperious, endearing. Her goal was to create a magazine for "the well-dressed women with a well-dressed mind," she said. Her Bazaar brought first-rate journalism, fashion, fiction, and design, some of it startlingly avant-garde, to America, setting the cultural pace of this country for decades to come.
Snow discovered and / or nurtured the careers of such disparate artists as the designers Cristóbal Balenciaga and Claire McCardell; illustrators, including Andy Warhol and Jean Cocteau; such writers as Truman Capote and Carson McCullers; and legendary photographers, from Brassens to Louise Dahl-Wolfe.
The renowned photographer Richard Avedon summed up her influence most succinctly: “Carmel Snow taught me everything I know,” he told me, in one of the last interviews he gave before his death in 2004.
I'm currently working on another biography, it's subject to be revealed in time.
ANTHOLOGIES
My other recent books include two anthologies. In each case, I edited the collection, while also contributing the introduction and an essay of my own.
Now in its 16th printing, Paris Was Ours: 32 Writers Reflect on the City of Light ˆ(Hachette / Algonquin Books, 2011) is about the transformative effect of living in Paris. I reached out to others who had spent serious time in this city, curious to see if their experiences matched my abiding sense that, while Paris can be a daunting place in which to live, the consequences of doing so are deep and longlasting. Contributors include: Diane Johnson; the Cuban novelist Zoe Valdes; Joe Queenan; Judith Thurman; the Iraqi-born editor Samuel Shimon; Stacy Schiff, and others.
My anthology The Beatles Are Here!: 50 Years After the Band Arrived in America, Writers, Musicians and Other Fans Remember (Hachette / Algonquin, 2014) was inspired by a photo published in The New York Times of a preteen me - screaming, of course - with several other Beatlemaniacs during one of this band's early visits to New York City. That photo graces the cover of this collection, which commemorates the band's dramatic 1964 arrival in the US. Contributors range from writers (Greil Marcus, Pico Iyer, Sigrid Nunez, and others); musicians, from Billy Joel to Bob Dylan; and assorted fans, including we girls from the Times photo, who refound each other so many years later.
DESIGN BOOKS
I've also written three volumes on design, all published by Chronicle Books. Weekend Houses, which I coauthored with photographer Mark Darley, was published in 2000. My monographs Jean Prouvé: Visionary Humanist and Eileen Gray: Modern Alchemist, on two forward-thinking European architects and industrial designers from the 1930s and beyond, came out in 2002 as part of Chronicle's Compact Design series.