The Dress in the Window
Page 29
It’s the journey, you know.
These days it’s writing that’s got me in its grip. I scrawl and type and move the words around with every bit as much fervor as I once did working furiously to finish a dress in time for a dance. I wish my mother had had a chance to see my book in print; I wish I could hand her a finished copy with the same quiet satisfaction and lack of ceremony as she once handed me a patched pair of jeans. We’re scrappers, makers, dreamers, she and I, and I can only hope that she would delight as much in my made-up story as I did in that long-ago yellow dress.
Q&A with Sofia Grant
Q: The Dress in the Window opens at the end of WWII, when Americans celebrated the return of peace to the world. But your characters hardly count themselves lucky or prosperous.
A: I think the popular contemporary notion of the end of the war—immortalized in that Times Square photo of the soldier kissing a pretty girl—glosses over the horrific losses from which the world would take a long time to recover. It was a very different era, of course, when a sturdy emotional constitution, an ability to “buck up,” was encouraged and pain was considered something to hide away. We know that many soldiers who returned from that war suffered their traumatic memories in silence, and that many women who lost sons and husbands and lovers lacked outlets for their grief.
This is fascinating fodder for the type of story that reveals its characters’ inner lives in a slow and tantalizing fashion, which is what I set out to do here. I sometimes think that readers would be startled by me and my friends, who can pour our hearts out over a single cocktail, but can’t sustain a sense of dramatic tension long enough to properly recount a good piece of gossip. Fiction, of course, is another matter entirely—thank heavens!
Q: What made you choose the fashion industry as a backdrop?
A: The years following the war were marked by a sea change in style whose scale is difficult to comprehend now. When Christian Dior debuted his “New Look” in 1949, the uproar it caused represented a major social shift. The lean, spare, serious styles of the forties—dictated by rationing and scarcity as well as the androgynous uniforms adopted by women pressed into service in the jobs soldiers left behind—gave way in an instant to an outrageous celebration of femininity. Women who’d proudly rolled up their sleeves, like Rosie the Riveter, now seized hungrily on bouffant skirts and sweetheart necklines and demure, soft shoulders.
It was an illusion, of course, that would be shattered a generation later by the Feminine Mystique and a new era of feminist thinking, as well as even more shocking developments in the fashion world. But what interests me are the ways women coped with having to subvert the independence and freedom to which they’d been so recently—and briefly—introduced. Fashion gave them an outlet to express themselves during and after the war years.
Q: Do you consider yourself fashionable?
A: I wrote much of this novel while wearing a man’s fleece-lined flannel shirt and a pair of yoga pants with a large stain on the thigh that resulted from a late-night dash to Chinatown for Sichuan noodles. Fashion, it is safe to say, eludes me.
But I do appreciate well-chosen clothing on other people. My mother was the sort of woman who took pride in looking sharp. She would never have worn a garment that had not first been tailored precisely for her figure—or, for that matter, one that did not compliment her. I can’t imagine measuring up to her example.
Q: The sisters’ relationship is volatile but also obviously deep and powerful. Do you have a sister of your own?
A: Indeed I do, and I treasure her more than I can say. I hope that she will detect in this story an apology for the times I have been hurtful and mean, and an appreciation for all the grace she has brought to my life.
Q: Many of the men in this story are dead—and they don’t seem to be missed either.
A: I sometimes think it takes an extraordinary man to rise up above society’s expectations of his gender, and that may have been especially true in the middle of last century. It’s all too easy to be a cad when boorish behavior is not only tolerated but encouraged. But moments of kindness, gallantry, and even heroism shine through all those shades of gray. I don’t think that Leo and Frank and Henry and Thomas were bad men . . . but men were irrelevant in many ways to the place and time in which my characters found themselves. (Until, of course, the magnificent Anthony Salvatici appeared!)
It was also important to me to give Thelma sexual agency, as a mature woman with some hard miles behind her. It didn’t seem true to her character to mourn the loss of her unremarkable husband. I think we tend to think of our foremothers laboring stolidly but chastely through middle age—but I suspect that we do them a disservice. And, of course, there’s the fact that I’m Thelma’s age, and I’d like to think I’ve got a few saucy moments left!
Bibliography
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Colman, Penny. Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on the Home Front in World War II. New York: Crown, 1995. Print.
Feininger, Andreas, and John Von Hartz. New York in the Forties. New York: Dover Publications, 1978. Print.
Hirsch, Gretchen, Karen Pearson, and Sun Young Park. Gertie Sews Vintage Casual: A Modern Guide to Sportswear Styles of the 1940s and 1950s. n.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
Laboissonniere, Wade. Blueprints of Fashion: Home Sewing Patterns of the 1940s. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Pub., 1997. Print.
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Litoff, Judy Barrett., and David C. Smith. Since You Went Away: World War II Letters from American Women on the Home Front. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Print.
Marcus, Hanna Perlstein. Sidonia’s Thread: The Secrets of a Mother and Daughter Sewing a New Life in America. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2012. Print.
Olian, JoAnne. Everyday Fashions of the Fifties: As Pictured in Sears Catalogs. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002. Print.
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Palmer, Alexandra. Couture & Commerce: The Transatlantic Fashion Trade in the 1950s. Vancouver: UBC, 2001. Print.
Przybyszewski, Linda. The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish. New York City: Basic, 2014. Print.
Reid, Constance. Slacks and Calluses: Our Summer in a Bomber Factory. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1999. Print.
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Whitaker, Jan. Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class. New York: St. Martin’s, 2006. Print.
Wilcox, Claire. The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London, 1947–57. London: V & A, 2007. Print.
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Credits
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Cover photographs: © Elisabeth Ansley / Trevillion Images (woman); © Sandra Cunningham / Shutterstock (background)
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE DRESS IN THE WINDOW. Copyright © 2017 by Sophie Littlefield. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means,
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FIRST EDITION
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Print ISBN 978-0-06-249972-1
EPub Edition JULY 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-249973-8
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