Arts

The Life in Your Clothes, Not the Clothes in Your Life

Delia and Nora Ephron discuss their new play, Love, Loss, and What I Wore.

Early last week, I met with the sisters Ephron at the restaurant Esca to talk about their new play, Love, Loss, and What I Wore, which officially opens at the Westside Theater on Oct. 1. The play is largely based on the illustrated autobiography of Ilene “Gingy” Beckerman, who published her memoir at the age of 60 in 1995. It was an instant best-seller.

A few years ago, Nora and her sister Delia, both writers and popular screenwriters of, most recently, Julie and Julia and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, respectively, began collaborating on a stage adaptation of Gingy’s story. The sisters Ephron asked their friends to contribute their own What I Wore memories and vignettes. The resulting play, the dramaturgy of which consists of the intimate—and, crucially to the sisters Ephron—easy-to-produce formula of five actresses seated on stools, is directed by Karen Carpenter.

Over plates of tomato salad, roasted corn, and pasta, we talked about the autobiographical potential of clothes, our frustrations with fashion, Nora’s obsessions with black sweaters and a “terrifyingly stylish” woman who appears in Bill Cunningham’s street fashion pictures, Delia’s upcoming YA book, and, inevitably, the horrendousness of aging.

Erika Kawalek: So, why did you adapt Love, Loss, and What I Wore?

Nora Ephron: I just loved the book, and so did Delia. I actually read it in manuscript. I thought it was a very weird, magical book. Did you read it? And didn’t you find yourself thinking about your life within six pages?

Erika: Definitely, I did.

Nora: And the thing that struck me is that the book is not about fashion at all. It’s about a much deeper question: How much clothes are us, or fail to be us. The more I think about it, the more interesting it is to me that so few people have written about clothes in this way, which is as autobiography, as opposed to this thing you go out and buy.

Delia Ephron: Music is the other thing people associate with distinct times in their lives. But music isn’t always playing. Clothes are an inevitable part of daily existence.

Nora: It’s the first thing you can do! You cannot decide what to eat. Your mother is deciding that. You cannot decide which school you are going to. Choosing your clothes is a major decision put into your hands when you are very small.

Delia: And it’s a way to fantasize.

Nora: Yes!

Delia: Putting on the tutus. Who am I?

Erika: Who can I become? Who do I not want to become?

Nora: Yes. And even for people very young who realize when they are very young that they are not as good at clothes as other people. It’s not like opera, where you can just stop listening—

[Laughter]

Nora:—you have to go on getting dressed.

Erika: Were you two good with clothes when you were younger?

Nora: I certainly had moments as a teenager where I wished I had known that everyone was buying a par of shoes that they forgot to tell me they were all buying. There was a lot of that. But it didn’t scar me in any way. Our mother was focused on us having careers and she didn’t love shopping. I was a tomboy, Delia was a tomboy. We were athletes and on the school newspaper. We weren’t those girly-girly girls. Right?

Delia: Yes.

Tags: armani, delia ephron, ilene beckerman, loss and what I wore, love, natasha lyonne, nora ephron, rosie o’donnell, samantha bee

Erika Kawalek is a New York-based journalist and author of the forthcoming fashion chronicle, Ragpicker.

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