Colleen Taylor

'What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?' cried Daisy, 'and the day after that, and the next thirty years?'

'Don't be morbid,' Jordan said. 'Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.'

--From F. Scott's The Great Gatsby, of course

Another great find from this week's NYTimes Book Review is New Yorker writer Tad Friend's memoir, "Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor.

The Times pithily describes Friend's book as recounting "with amiable nostalgia, the foibles and predilections of a declining caste."  Although I'm not exactly from the Nantucket-summer-home set, I can certainly relate in a general way to some of the idiosyncrasies he describes.

A couple good excerpts:

“If Catholic guilt is ‘I’ve been bad’ and Jewish guilt is ‘You’ve been bad,’ then WASP guilt is ‘You probably think I’ve been bad.’ ”

“Visible striving or seriousness of purpose is unWASP because it suggests that you aren't yet at-- haven't always been at-- the top."

“The two biggest self-­deceptions of all are that life has a ‘meaning’ and that each of us is unique.”

-David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) in his new book, Bicycle Diaries, reviewed this week in the New York Times

Ha-- I'm looking forward to reading this book.

Two (of many*) quotable bits from the fantastic Diane Von Furstenberg interview** in this month's Harper's Bazaar:

What would you say is your favorite thing about being married?
DVF: I don't know. No one's ever asked me that. I mean, I don't particularly like to be married. I don't know. It feels very natural. I don't feel like I'm a prisoner. So the things I like the best about being married are probably the things that aren't very typical about being married. I can't believe I married twice. I so don't care about being married.

Now, you realize that you're a commanding, magnetic presence.  Were you always like that?
DVF: You don't see yourself like that.  Nobody does.  You know, there's a thing about the woman across the room. You see the woman across the room and you think, She's so poised, she's so together.  But she looks at you and you are the woman across the room for her.***


*DVF should really have been on the cover instead of Janet Jackson.  I mean, if "I can be an emotional eater" is the highlighted, takeaway quote from the cover story, you know it's a dull one. We all know you are, Janet. Let's move on.

** This is a great interview because it's in that transcript style that seems straight from the tape recorder. I love to get a feel for how a person really talks, especially when they have so many interesting things to say.

*** DVF was literally once the woman across the room for me, four years ago, when we were both at the same luncheon at the Four Seasons in New York (yes, it was one of those boom-time media events.)  I met her briefly, and she really is a magnetic presence--smart and seasoned and beautiful and chic and so completely comfortable in the world.

But what's really remarkable is that even though she clearly has a lot she could say about herself and her decades of experiences, she genuinely seems more interested in learning about you and what you're doing. That's very rare in general, and especially in people over a certain age. It's definitely how I want to be when I grow up.