I have an enormous crush on this book. I got excited when I heard there was a new Sheila Heti book being released, without knowing anything about it. I knew there were lots of other women involved (the cover reads "Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton & 639 others") but Sheila Heti's presence was enough to motivate me to pre-order it. In the weeks before the book was released, I came across it in all my usual book-related blogs and Twitter feeds, where I found out that among those 639 contributors were many other women I whose writing I admire and adore. Plus it's beautiful and weighty and lush in a very satisfying way; everything about it feels so modern and so...designerly. Lots of books are beautiful, but in this case it takes nothing away from the quality of the contents.
Ostensibly, it's a book about clothes, based largely on a survey written by Heti, Julavits and Shapton and sent to hundreds of women, some stylish, some not so stylish, some famous, some not famous, asking about their wardrobes and their habits and attitudes about dressing. Heti's introduction is really literal in that she went to the bookstore to find a nice volume on style and dress and found nothing that met her needs, which is understandable. Tim Gunn is great, but his advice doesn't necessarily apply to a writer living in Toronto who can probably get away with wearing pajamas most of the time; nor, in a sense, do style books really apply to the average women today. What I have loved about Sheila Heti's writing in the past is her ability to somehow put into words the experience of being a twentysomething woman that is chillingly accurate, unflinchingly honest and critical, and never condescending. I hate the generational terms that get thrown around, and I especially hate all the baggage that necessarily comes to mind when anyone mentions "Generation Y" or "Millenials," but it is a realm of experience that Heti knows well, and she applies the same principles and contemporary sensibilities of her fiction to essays on clothing and style. The result is so refreshing and startling and still somehow very comforting.