A LEFT-HANDED WOMAN

A collection of essays from an incisive cultural observer.

National Book Award winner Thurman, a biographer and essayist who has been a staff writer at the New Yorker for more than two decades, assembles 40 pieces, published from 2007 to 2021, on art, culture, books, and fashion, many focused on the “lost women who have been my specialty as a writer.” The title comes from her own experience growing up left-handed, which taught her that somehow she wasn’t “right,” a feeling echoed by other women she profiles. While not all have been lost to history—Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, Alison Bechdel, Helen Gurley Brown, for example—each of them defied the image of how a “right” woman could and should behave. Thurman’s discoveries include ceramicist and industrial designer Eva Zeisel, a “maverick modernist”; avant-garde photographer Grete Stern; Black fashion designer Ann Lowe, who created Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding dress; and outspoken Betty Halbreich, a personal shopper at Bergdorf’s, who gives Thurman a tour of her own cavernous closets. Thurman’s fascination with fashion—as culture, craft, and art—informs pieces about Charles James, Alexander McQueen, Paul Poiret, and Miuccia Prada, occasioned by museum retrospectives. Thurman’s interests are capacious: lost language speakers, hyperpolygots, Cleopatra, and, not least, art and artists. When she was in her early 20s, living abroad, she met Balthus and posed for his wife, also a painter. She recounts a visit to performance artist Marina Abramović at her Hudson Valley home as well as her visits to sites of prehistoric cave paintings. She also chronicles her discussions with actors Charlotte Rampling (about sex) and Liv Ullmann (about Ingmar Bergman). In her introduction and in a few other essays, Thurman drops a few tantalizing personal details, but memoir is not her aim: “I write about the lives and work of other people in part to understand my own, while avoiding what I feel obliged to do here: talk about myself.”

Finely crafted, graceful, captivating pieces.