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The first time I realized I was breaking up with a female friend, an Irish friend I’d met during my year at Trinity in Dublin, a wild, talented, impossible woman with whom I had shared many drunken nights, the stage, family sadness and other things, came when I realized she had pursued and captured my ex-boyfriend for whom I pined, while he remained elusive. I had called from the States to talk to her, and her sister told me she was with him in his faraway country, a place I had longed to visit.

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I was that kid whose name was often broadcast over public loudspeakers, the zoo, the supermarket, the department store, once on an ocean liner, and another time from a police car when I disappeared on a trip to Fire Island. That day was going really well after I joined a family having a vast beach picnic and was fed lobster until the families left with their own children. When I was a teenager, I saved my babysitting money until I had enough to go to Europe on my own. My sister made the mistake of revealing her earnings, so my parents suggested she pay for stuff. I remained mute until one day I announced I was spending the summer in England and Ireland. One year my mother gave us money after she finished a design job. My sister got her roof fixed; I flew away. My father’s nickname for me was “The Bolter” after an English woman with five husbands who was always running off. I only had three husbands.

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We grew up without mirrors. I mean, there was a round, smallish mirror in the dining room and standard size medicine cabinet mirrors but nothing to see your entire body or even most of it. For a family of mainly women, three daughters and a mother, the aspects of femininity that I noticed in friend’s houses, the vanities, the collection of makeup, the mirrors, just didn’t exist. My mother’s credo, honed at Harvard design school, was “form follows function.” She washed her thick, chestnut hair in the kitchen sink with dish detergent, rarely wore makeup, and remained absorbed by her work and my father. Luckily, she was a knockout and when she did dress up, lipstick, mascara, she took my breath away. We were important but tangential and reflective; our beauty reflected on her. My father’s judgement was sacred and harsh. His only caveat applied to weight. Whatever you do, don’t get fat.

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