a question for this languorous long weekend: what is the best nonfiction book you've ever read about a woman who had a glamorous life? you can interpret glamour wildly. for me the word connotes freedom and style (which is not the same as wealth) and a certain largeness of vision

to get you going i will list ten to add to your winter reading lists/to gift to a person in your life who would like to read about women who lived spiritually beyond their means

1) My Soul Looks Back by Jessica B. Harris: a memoir about neon nyc in the 1970s; harris hung out w/ baldwin and angelou and was a theater critic who cooked lavish meals and bumped around underground clubs in the village; the whole book smells like good butter and cigarettes

2) Some of My Lives by Rosamund Bernier: Bernier was for YEARS the most popular public art lecturer @ the Met Museum, where she gave big sold out gossip-filled talks about her life as a Vogue editor in Paris where she became pals w/ Matisse, Miro, Braque etc. She lived to be 100.

3) Alla by Gavin Lambert: I am obsesssssed with Alla Nazimova and right now this is the landmark text on her life; she was the most famous stage Russian actor of the 1910s and then went to Hollywood where she built a lesbian grotto mansion and funded her own silent film career

4) Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera: In February, a V&A exhibition of Frida's clothes and ephemera will come to the Brooklyn Museum; you can read all about her life and work before you go take in that sumptuous show

5) Lee Miller by Carolyn Burke; Burke is kind of the laureate of glamorous woman biographies (she did Mina Loy, Edith Piaf) but this one about the model turned photographer who had an affair with Man Ray is my very favorite of hers

6) Queen of Bebop by Elaine Hayes: This book by a woman who has spent her life studying women in jazz was one of the BEST books I read in 2017; I am still thinking about Vaughan's life in little flashes all the time when I walk through New York

7) Catherine the Great by Robert Massie: If you want to read ONE book about the misunderstood Russian queen this is the one; I wanted to wrap this book around me like a blanket when I was reading it and was devastated when it ended

8) Empress Dowager Cixi by Jung Chang: One of the biggest most complex lives you can imagine; this is the sort of book you start reading and then suddenly two weeks goes by and you remember you had a life and responsibilities

9) Genet by Brenda Wineapple: Janet Flanner (who renamed herself Genet) was the Paris correspondent for the New Yorker in the 1920s (after she fled to France with her female lover in her thirties!); she knew everyone and everything in Paris and had a viper tongue and i love her

10) Misia by Arthur Gold and Robert Fitzdale: Misia Sert was a pianist who ran a famed salon and knew literally EVERYONE in the belle epoque, we're talking Débussy, Toulouse-Lautrec, Najinsky, Bonnard, Faure, Diaghalev (whose funeral she arranged?) and like everyone else

as it would turn out i have a list of 100 of these at the ready. these ten were pretty much chosen at random from a big doc i keep on my desktop. would you all be interested perhaps in a newsletter or something in the new year where you get these recs/lil' intros to these lives?

it is my life's work to get you all to read more nonfiction about women who did what they could to carve out some semblance of an interesting life within whatever confines they could

also i fully believe supporting authors who put out books this year is good + a thing you should do at the end of the year, but also, NOTHING is better as a gift than a curated selection of out of print books about women who lived w/a little note as to why you picked these lives

every single time, this gift KILLS. trust me.

I was gonna add ten more but you all are doing this so valiantly now u have to go out and buy 100 books instead

You can follow @rachsyme.

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