Finding My Literary Style (with a Little Help From My Mother)

I wear my mother’s cropped grey jacket to the book launch party in LA. Her navy blazer with pinstripes to my book reading in Brooklyn. Her leopard print scarf on my way to introduce Jennifer Egan at Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh. In Seattle, Corte Madera, Kansas City, I wear her thin platinum bracelet beaded with the tiniest diamonds cuffed around my wrist.

On my first book tour, my mother accompanies me every night. In her clothes we share a closeness that we could not grasp while she was alive. We both looked for it, sometimes I wonder if our love was made of this looking and not finding and still looking. E.M. Forster claims that in novels we can understand characters on the page more than our own families, our own mothers. But what if my mother’s clothes are a story of her that I may enter, that she may share with me, that we may recover.

My mother could wear a bland sweater and put on a white collared shirt underneath, a pair of black jeans, one of her scarves, and look like a Parisian. She spoke French; she’d lived in Paris as a teenager. My mother worked as a buyer for women’s fashion at a department store in L.A. until the day her water broke and I was born. I remember the afternoon she volunteered in my third-grade classroom wearing a wide-collared striped shirt tucked into flared maroon pants, her dark brown hair pulled back loosely in a ponytail, and I understood my mother was stunningly beautiful. In high school, I would look at my mother and then my father with his mustache and short-sleeved button down shirts and think, How did he get her?

The book tour is for my debut and in preparing I watch writers more carefully at their readings. I consider what kinds of intimacy they share with their audience, how they tell their stories. I don’t pay attention to clothes, at first, but in New York on a panel for Jami Attenberg’s 1,000 Words, Mira Jacob appears casually elegant in her black top, wide-legged red pants, and short white boots. I don’t expect to pull that off, but my mother could. When I debate book tour clothes with my daughter and sons, my older son, a poet, says, Mom, you’re a writer, you can wear anything. I agree, and yet wonder what that freedom looks like on me.

In ninth grade, I am an inch taller than my mother’s 5’9” and several nights a week I stand before her closet and find clothes for the next school day. To my mother, clothes are easily shared. She arranges outfits as if they belong to families: shirt, jacket, pant, T-shirt together and anything that might overlap nearby, this shirt with that pant or skirt. I love wearing a pair of her bright green shorts, and I fight with the top button for weeks until I can’t bring the sides together. I’m growing five inches taller than my mother, and with every inch I move farther away from her closet. I no longer fit, and I no longer want to.

Instead, I blend into high school. I wear what I see: white T-shirts and cotton leggings and secondhand Levi’s and tiny black skirts. My mother doesn’t care, maybe she’s relieved. But we like to shop together. We shop for clothes as if our bodies are meant to look interesting. In West Hollywood, she buys me a skin-tight thinly striped brown and black prom dress with cut outs around the middle. We shop as devoted readers of her Vogue magazines, not as if she is my mother and supposed to tell me no.

On the church patio after my mother’s memorial, friends of hers I’ve never met tell me I look just like my mother. I have fair skin, green eyes, and straight blond hair; my mother olive skin, brown eyes, and that dark brown curly hair. We are not a pair, unless you look closely. Our cheekbones give us away. As a girl, I consider deeply why my younger brother and I don’t look like her, as we are blond and blue/green-eyed like my father’s Scandinavian relatives. During a fight with my mother when I’m twelve or thirteen, I decide that I was adopted and loathe her for hiding the truth. My proof, that we look nothing alike and she cannot understand me. I don’t remember her convincing me otherwise, only my despair at our apartness.

Six months after her memorial, my father texts that he’s ready to clean out her closet. I imagine my mother’s friends picking through her hangers, the outfit ensembles, the wool coats carefully stored for a possible trip to Paris. My brother and his family plan to fly out from the east coast months later, but I cannot wait. I feel the panic of time slipping away, my mother already gone and next her clothes. I look for flights from San Francisco where I lived to LA. I call my friend Loren, ask if she will come with me to look at my mother’s closet. It is not an experience I can imagine alone.

On Zoom, I watch Dani Shapiro in a pink jewel-tone sweater and jeans at a reading for her novel Signal Fires in a New York apartment. During the Q and A, she mentions her mother’s great sense of style, and a woman asks whether she wears any of her mother’s clothes. This question rivets me, the LA trip to my mother’s closet just days away. Shapiro has written about her uneven relationship with her mother. That evening, she admits she didn’t keep her mother’s clothes. We have different coloring, she says. Some of her mother’s clothes now belong to Shapiro’s friend who wears a gifted sweater when they meet for lunch.

Loren and I arrive at my father’s house, the house where I grew up, and follow him into the bedroom and then to a small, unfamiliar walk-in closet, part of a remodel I’d forgotten. The closet I rummaged in ninth grade was long, with sliding doors. Loren talks to my father while I stand at the open closet doorway, the shelves and cubbies and racks full of my mother’s clothes. She stood here every morning, deciding.

I am a child at this threshold, gazing at the scarves circled like sleeping snakes on shelves, the T-shirts stacked in cubbies for hikes with the dog, the blazers hanging smartly for her Wednesday open houses. My mother closed her last real estate sale from a hospital bed. I smell her sophisticated floral scent that I don’t know the name for, dry and peppery beneath mild peonies, not an older woman scent, a woman who works in fashion scent.

The closet overflows with her absence, her missing body. I take a step back. I notice a see-through sensation in my arms as if I’m disappearing. I want to get to the floor, lie down there, but I’m not alone. My father’s telling Loren a story, she laughs. Later, my therapist will tell me that I could have asked my father to wait in the kitchen while I spent time with my mother’s things. But I feel like a distant relative, as if I barely hold any right to my mother. She belonged to my father now, or to herself and my father her anointed trustee. I bend over as if I’m looking into the bottom of the closet. I look for one piece of clothing that might steady me.

I pull the navy blazer with pinstripes from a hanger and slip my hands through, shrug my shoulders into the soft cool satin lining. I fit because I am slimmer than the teenager who played volleyball and lifted weights. And my mother’s style changed to meet mine, or mine to hers; somewhere, here, our bodies twine. I walk out to Loren, Yes! she says. She has an eye for style like my mother, and curly hair, she still sees the hair stylist my mother recommended to her decades ago. I slip off the blazer, lay it on the bed since there’s nowhere else to put it. I try another blazer. Loren nods. You look so good in these clothes! My father sits stiffly in the chair by my mother’s empty desk, winces as he smiles. I wonder if he remembers her standing here in these clothes, if he will stop me, but he nods as if he wants us to carry on.

The dresses I don’t have time to try on but it’s obvious which ones suit me, or my daughter. She’s graduating from college and will need my mother’s clothes in her job as a high school English teacher. She wears one of the dresses, pale blue silk with a delicate navy and green print, a loose cut that drapes below the knee, to Jennifer Egan’s lecture. (My publicist loves this dress, will ask her at the reception: Where did you get that dress? My daughter: My grandmother’s closet.) I think of my teenage nieces, my sister-in-law, I’m careful to leave as many of my mother’s clothes for them.

As a girl, I loved her chunky knit sweaters and those green shorts. Instead I try on a blue striped fitted sweater, a green linen blazer, her black leather motorcycle jacket. Her closet curated by instinct, by joy, and perhaps what I’d sought at its edges as a teenager. I don’t know whether daughters have first rights to their mothers, but sometimes, or all the time, I want one. When I ask myself why, I feel that same rising panic of losing time, my mother’s leaving and my refusal to let her go.

The clothes pile high on the bed, and my father returns with an empty suitcase from the garage. From a hallway closet, he hands me a lavender grey leather trench coat he bought for my mother. He loved to buy her clothes but she was difficult to please. Mostly she bought for herself. I try on the coat, my father winces again, turns away. Before my mother earned her own income selling houses, she hid new clothes in a bag at the back of the closet and introduced them slowly so he wouldn’t notice, question the expense. I don’t think he ever did.

A few years before she died, I started buying my mother nice purses for her birthdays as a way to convey what I could not seem to in words, I want so much to offer you happiness and not these complicated conversations! I see them on a shelf in the closet, the purple over the shoulder, the green printed tote. I keep my purses hidden in soft bags up high, but my mother sets hers eye-level, on display. The green and purple bags gathered with other bright colors, and brown and black clutches ready for dinners out. I take the purple purse for my daughter, the green tote for me. They look like new, like everything else here except my mother’s dog walking sweats. If I ask my father whether she wore her birthday purses, he will lie for her. But my mother set them in front, she would have seen them every day.

Loren and I look at my mother’s clothes on the bed, the suitcase open on the floor. Take it, she says, take all of it.

The night I wear the navy blazer with pinstripes to my reading in Brooklyn, I arrive early and walk to a café around the corner. It’s a warm fall night and I’ve got a T-shirt on underneath. I feel the silk lining on my skin and know that I will love wearing the blazer for the rest of my life. Only then do I wonder and slide it from my shoulders and read the tag: Ralph Lauren. I feel the gift from my mother doubly, the expense, the styling I would not think of for myself. My mother’s clothes show me that our conversations may go on without ending. And in her fitted blazers, her leopard scarves (she had two), her tapered white shirts, she asks what I might do differently, what I might let my body take part in now.