Genevieve Smith didn’t care about money, but then she did. Her essay for Elle on the the evolution of her opinions on the stuff, and why she eventually sought out more of it, is super—especially her honesty:

But then something began to shift: My thin resources started to bump against some serious pent-up consumptive desire. I wanted to buy things, mostly shoes, but also vacations, a dog, organic produce, dinners out, drinks. Eventually, I grew tired of our used furniture, IKEA shelving, Chinatown bus tickets—the couch. I didn’t want to feel this abject guilt every time I swiped the credit card, a sense that I was pushing our dreams of children and a home further away with every discretionary purchase. What I didn’t understand when I graduated college was that following your passions wouldn’t always be enough. Sometimes you’d want those other things, too.

She also talks to Emily Gould about working for art versus working for money, and Emily, as ever, has some genius insight of her own:

“I’m aware that my plan, which is to be an exception, is a bad plan,” she said. “That’s my dream. I can’t make it not my dream. I want to own a brownstone and have a baby, and right now I have $12,000 in credit-card debt and haven’t had a paycheck larger than $100 since July.”

This essay, titled “Carpet Is Mungers,” is included in Meghan Daum’s My Misspent Youth, a collection of essays exploring being young and broke in New York. The book was first published in 2001, and is now available as an ebook (with a new introduction by the author!) exclusively from Emily Books.

Once, when I was desperately searching for an affordable apartment in New York City, I looked at a place that was gigantic by local standards. It had two bedrooms, a kitchen nook, a dishwasher, and a sweeping view of the East River. The building was staffed by twenty-four-hour doormen and had a running track and a garden on the roof. It rented for $400 a month. This was in a rental market where studio apartments rarely went for less than $1,100 a month, and it was unheard of to have sunlight let alone things like dishwashers and running tracks. I was in dire need of a place to live. I had precisely ten days to find something before I’d be forced to put my stuff in storage and sleep on a friend’s couch. But I did not rent the apartment. I did not for one minute entertain the possibility of living there. I did not even look in the closets, of which there were many. The reason is that the apartment had wall-to wall carpet.

Carpet makes me want to kill myself. Wall-to-wall carpet anywhere other than offices, airplanes, and Holiday Inn lobbies sends me careening toward a kind of despair that can only be described as the feeling that might be experienced by a person who has made some monumental and irreversible life decision and realized, almost immediately after the fact, that it was an error of epic proportions. Carpet makes me feel the way the woman who married the multimillionaire stranger on national television must have felt when she was on the plane to the honeymoon in Maui, the $35,000 rock on her finger, and her possibly sociopathic husband next to her in first class. Carpet makes me feel the way I felt when I was twelve and “went out” with Stephen Mungers, a boy from homeroom who I barely knew, for a week. In seventh grade, “going out” signified nothing more than a mutual agreement that the term would be applied to the parties involved; no physical contact or verbal exchange other than “You wanna go out?” and “Okay” was required. And even though the situation was entirely reversible, I remember that week as an unprecedented and traumatic psychological jaunt into a self that was not my own. I had, in the context of seventh grade and the various ideas I’d developed about who I was, become “other” to my own self. I felt somehow that I had betrayed a basic premise of my existence. And although I was unsure exactly what that premise was, I specifically recall spending that week practicing the oboe with such concentration and nervous energy that I finally mastered a particularly arduous exercise and decided, with more certainty than has since accompanied more serious matters, that as long as I went out with Stephen Mungers I would be wholly incapable of being the person I should be and, in fact, was. A similar effect occurs when I walk into a house where not one square inch of floor is showing.

Carpet is Mungers. Carpet is otherness. It is not my house and not the house of ninety percent of the people I know. It’s more than just not my style, it’s not my oeuvre. People always say to me, “Oh, I don’t like carpet either. It makes me sneeze and it’s so hard to clean.” Sneezing and cleaning have nothing to do with my feelings on the subject. If not having carpet caused allergies and presented maintenance difficulties, I would tough it out. It’s really shallow, I know. But I’m capable of being extremely shallow, far more superficial that I’m often given credit for. There’s a lot of stuff I can look past—unemployed boyfriends, borderline personalities, offensive comments aimed directly at me—but when I balk, I balk hard. When you get to a certain age you learn what the deal breakers are.

But let’s cut to the chase. Carpet is a class issue. I didn’t make it that way, I’m just pointing it out. And I’m not talking about socioeconomic class. Carpet has, since its inception, been the province of the elite. It’s found in high-rise condos and suburban ranch houses. Cheap landlords like to install cheap carpet in cheap rentals so they can raise the price and it amazes and depresses me that people actually buy into this. But I also realize that many of the people who don’t mind or even like carpet possess the kind of “class” that, in my earlier days, I believed ran in inverse proportion to wall-to-wall floor covering of any kind. In other words, I did not believe that they read books, owned classical music CDs, or were not necessarily members of the John Birch Society.

That false perception was the result of confusing “having class” with “having to have class.” The kind of class that I associate with wood floors is the kind of class that emerges out of an anxiety about being classy. People who must have wood floors are people who need to convey the message that they’re quite possibly better than most people. They’re people who leave The New York Review of Books on the coffee table but keep People in the bedroom. They’re people who say “I don’t need to read Time or Newsweek because I can get everything I need from the Times.” They’re people who would no sooner put the television set in the living room than hang their underwear to dry on the front porch. They buy whole-bean coffee and grind it in a Braun grinder. They listen to NPR, tell other people what they heard on it, and are amazed when the other people say they heard it too.

I am one of those people. My TV is in a room that also contains a pile of magazines I won’t admit to reading, a Kenny Loggins CD I don’t want anyone to see, and a Restoration Hardware catalog from which I want very much to order a Teacher’s College Chrome Plate Schoolhouse light, if only Restoration Hardware was not so wannabe, so postiche. My apartment has oak floors and oriental rugs and, for as long as I can remember, oak floors and oriental rugs have played as great a role in my sense of well-being as the knowledge that after falling asleep I would eventually wake up. I haven’t bought a can of Maxwell House in over ten years. I have an intellectual crush on former Talk Of The Nation host Ray Suarez and a WNYC coffee mug out of which I eat Grape-Nuts but never Total. I use Arm & Hammer laundry powder. The thought of owning a bed that is not a platform bed, i. e. one that has a box spring and therefore requires a dust ruffle, lowers my serotonin level. I do not wear colors any brighter than pale blue or dusty rose. I do not wear panty hose, only tights. I do not wear gold jewelry. I would never drive an American car. I stick to these rules because I am terrified of what would happen if I deviated from them. I fear the “other.” I fear carpet.

Maxwell House is carpet. Total is carpet. All-temperature Cheer is carpet, as is commercial talk radio, dust ruffles, bright-colored clothing, pantyhose, gold jewelry, and the United States Automotive Industry. Carpet is the road you congratulate yourself for never having taken. Carpet is the woman at the supermarket whom you are glad not to be. Carpet is the house who bought the oddly-named and aggressively bland-tasting Savannahs when you sold Girl Scout cookies. Carpet is the job you held immediately after graduation, before you realized that a career in marketing posed a severe threat to your emotional health. Carpet is the distant relatives you see only at funerals. Carpet is the high school sweetheart you would have disastrously married had you been born one generation earlier.

Here is a brief, heartbreaking story about carpet. I once loved a great man. He treated me with that rare combination of adoration and decency best known to characters that were once played by Jimmy Stewart and are now played by Kevin Costner. He showed up at my door with flowers. He embarrassed me in front of the mailman by sending me letters addressed “To My Sweetie” on the envelope. He could have been the one were it not for the sad fact that he could never, ever have been the one. For a brief period during our two-year relationship, I fantasized about our wedding: a Wyeth-esque outdoor affair, tents and mosquito netting, and a string quartet playing Bach in a wheat field. I would wear a 1920sera lace dress with a dropped waist and go barefoot. Friends would toast scintillatingly. The New York Times would run a Vows column with a headline like “Passion on the Plains.” But such an event would never come to pass. He was, despite his old-fashioned ways and gentlemanly demeanor, a reception hall and DJ type of man. He listened to Yanni. He enjoyed the television show Wings. His house had carpet and he was not bothered by it. He had, in fact, paid to have it installed. Though I believe to this day that his soul, at its core, is as pure and as capable of embracing my required snobberies as is the soul of any man with oak floors, it was shrouded in carpet. It was suffocating in pale-blue shag and our love was eventually subsumed under an expanse of Scotch-guarded fibers.

Carpet is the near miss, the ever-present land mine, the disaster that looms on the horizon. It’s the efficiency apartment you’ll be forced to move into if the business fails, the marriage collapses, the checks stop coming in, and the wolf breaks down the door and scratches up those precious polished floors. Carpet can be there when you least expect it; some of your best friends could have it. It could be the bad news at the end of the third date; sprawling across the bachelor pad from wall to wall, it’s what makes you decide not to go past first base. When I take a risk, what I put on the line are my essential, uncarpeted conditions. To venture into the unknown is to hazard a brush with the carpeted masses. They taunt and threaten from the sides of the road, their split-levels and satellite dishes forming pockmarks on the prairie, their luxury condo units driving up the cost of living.

Where there’s carpet, there’s been a mistake. Where there’s carpet, there’s Mungers. The arrangement is temporary. The clock is ticking. Carpet is a rental car, a borrowed jacket you’d never buy for yourself, the neighbor’s key ring, with some tacky trinket attached, that you keep in case she locks herself out. Carpet makes everybody a stranger. Carpet tells me it’s time to pack up and move on. When there’s carpet, every street gets me lost. Every restaurant is a Denny’s. Every room is a hotel room. My feet can’t quite touch the floor. I am so far away from home.

My Misspent Youth is available as an ebook from Emily Books. Megan Daum lives in Los Angeles. Previously from Emily Books: “Being a Cheesemonger Is Better And Worse Than You Think It Is,” an excerpt from Martha Grover’s One More For The People.

Emily Gould has written a really wonderful thing about New York and class and debt and food and hot sauce and winter—it’s great and you should read it. (“It’s cold here and a lot of people are awful. Good things disappear and bad things take their place. Rich people have too much power and they abuse it. The worst men you can imagine are fucking beautiful, talented women. Young people’s idealism and energy is siphoned off vampirically by exploitative bosses. Basic things are too expensive here, and expensive things are often offensively mediocre. Like the dinner we were eating. Or maybe I just wasn’t that hungry.”)

TO: EMILY
FROM: LOGAN
SUBJECT: (no subject)

I read your interview about yoga and buckwheat kasha. How do you eat buckwheat kasha? It seems like something I should eat.

TO: LOGAN
FROM: EMILY
SUBJECT: Re: (no subject)

Ok first off I have attached a photo because you want to be looking for something like this. It pretty much has to have writing on it in either cyrillic or hebrew. Even Polish kasha is pretty bad. Health food store or American-Jewish (Wolff’s) kasha is blech. I think it has to do with roasting. The fine print should indicate that your kasha is a product of the PRC (People’s Republic of China!) That’s because the world’s best kasha comes from Inner Mongolia!

Did I already lose you? It’s actually pretty easy to find at any Polish or Russian store, and once you start looking for these they are shockingly kind of everywhere. And it is very cheap, usually no more than a dollar a pound. 

To make kasha, you need a little pot with a lid (or you can put a plate over the pot, if no lid). Put a heaped cup of kasha in the pot and fill with cold water, then pour off the water to rinse. Boil your teakettle and cover the kasha with hot boiling water by about two inches, about double the volume of the kasha. Return to a boil and add a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of butter or oil. Do not stir. Turn down heat to a simmer, cover and wait about 15-20 minutes. Kasha is done when all the water is absorbed and grains are separate and fluffy (like rice.) Serve with
*more butter
*a side of eggs
*sliced avocado
*sweet-style — milk and brown sugar
or as a savory side dish, a base for stews or curries — the possibilities, while finite, are exciting!

As are the health benefits!
* While it has “wheat” in the name, it is not actually related to wheat so is a great food for people who are avoiding wheat.
*Buckwheat contains B vitamins and d-chiro-inositol, which studies (that I read about on the internet) say can help the liver process hormones, so it’s good for anytime your hormones are out of whack (pregnancy, menstruation, menopause).

Emily Gould may sell you on lesser known Asian grains for fun, but she sells books for profit (and also for fun). Emily Books’ latest pick is Nine Months by Paula Bomer. It’s about a woman who leaves her family after she gets pregnant with her third child. It basically doubles as birth control.

Emily Gould and Ruth Curry own and run Emily Books, an independent ebookstore offering books handpicked by them. It’s a fairly genius concept and a grand experiment in democratizing a business dominated by massive bookstore conglomerates. You know how it feels so much better to buy jam from the farmers market than the grocery store? It feels great to buy an ebook from Emily Books.

Also: If you buy a book from Emily Books, two genius ladies with great taste have not only okayed it, they’ve worked really hard to share it with you. Reading their books has made me smarter and also a better person, plus I went to an Emily Books event and met my new best friends, I am not making this up. ANYWAY. The service is totally awesome and Emily Books is my preferred company to buy ebooks from, but: Sometimes a person needs to buy a book that is not intellecutally-stimulating and world-widening fiction and memoir written by women. Sometimes a person needs to buy a paranormal teen romance or a self-help book. What then?

Emily graciously agreed to answer our important but inane questions about buying ebooks. — LS

What is an ebook?
Haha really? No, ok, fine. An ebook is an electronic book, formatted to read on an electronic reading device. It has pages you flip by touching the edge of the page with your finger (on an iPad or iPhone) or by pressing a button (Kindle, Nook, Kobo, etc).

It has some advantages over its printed brethren: unlike a print book you can search within it to find all the recurrences of a particular word or phrase the same way you’d search within a Word document or the Internet, it automatically holds your place, and you can carry around a whole library with you everywhere and never be stuck buying an Us Weekly full of Teen Moms you don’t care about because you forgot something to read on the plane/train. And it’s lighter, so you never have to worry that you’ll accidentally drop an 800 page hardcover on someone’s head on the subway and get arrested for assault.

Despite all this, printed books remain the most elegant and efficient way to read, with the huge advantage that by their very nature they prevent you from reading anything but themselves (ie, you cannot use them to look at Twitter). I like both for different purposes, and when I love a book I’ve read electronically I’ll usually buy a hard copy.

What are the different file types help I’m confused.
.epub is the general file format and .mobi is the proprietary Kindle file format. If you accidentally download a .mobi and want to read it on your iPhone or iPad, though, you can do so with the Kindle app.

This one book I really want to buy as an ebook is not available as an ebook, and that is frustrating.
Not all books are yet available as ebooks for a few reasons. I know firsthand that it can be very hard to convince publishers and authors that it’s worth the time and effort to make an ebook of their book. Some authors don’t want their books to exist as ebooks, thinking it will devalue the printed object. Other times it’s just a rights hassle that involves contacting a lot of difficult -to-contact people.

Depending on when a book was published, electronic files of any kind may not exist, which makes the conversion process that much harder. Also converting a print book to an ebook in a way that creates a pretty and readable text isn’t a matter of, like, pressing a button. It’s tricky and time consuming and we take a lot of pride in doing it well.

I want to support writers and independent booksellers and publishers. Where should I buy ebooks?
For now, downloading the Indiebound app and buying Google ebooks from your local independent bookstore or directly from the publisher when possible is your best solution. This program will be curtailed in January though and I don’t know what will happen then. The American Booksellers Association says it is contracting with a third party to find a way for independents to keep selling ebooks, which I will believe when I see it.

Um let me just interject here my opinion that, if you have to choose between companies that are coercing us into buying their planned-obsolescent devices by making things impossible to otherwise buy, I’d go with Apple over Amazon. Or Kobo over Amazon. Or Barnes & Noble (Nook) over Amazon. So: Second best solution is Kobo, third is Nook.

This isn’t really the right venue for all my rants but the short version is, Amazon is coercing publishers to sell books for lower prices, exerting way too much control over what gets published, and deliberately working to put independent bookstores out of business and take tax dollars away from towns and cities that need them Also they treat their warehouse workers deplorably.

Also obviously you should buy books from us, because we’re an independent ebookstore, but we only sell a handful of books so I understand that we’re not the solution if you are looking for a book that’s not … one of those books.

Is sharing ebooks stealing?
I don’t think it’s stealing. I don’t even think it’s stealing to remove DRM from a book and share it with your friend. (Google “remove DRM.”) If you can share print books with a friend, why shouldn’t you be able to share ebooks? Just as you wouldn’t xerox and distribute hundreds of copies of your library book, though, you shouldn’t put your ebooks up on torrent sites. Sorry to have to say something so “duh” but if you pirate books they will cease to exist. Or at least published books will. Self-published, uncopyedited dreck that is indistinguishable from the worst parts of the internet will be the only books our civilization has unless we keep paying for books.

What if I want to buy an ebook and give it to someone?
You know, this is a really good question and I have no idea what the answer is.  I would just email Christine Onorati at WORD if I wanted to do this and she would figure it out for me. Seriously.  (Or I’d get my friend an Emily Books gift certificate.)

Christine Onorati at WORD, how do I gift someone an ebook?
So at the moment, it’s sort of possible to gift an ebook from our indie commerce sites. Basically we can sell a digital gift code that can then be redeemed for an ebook. So a customer can buy a gift code and send it to another customer.  This isn’t exactly gifting an ebook, but it could be used to send a corresponding amount of money and a recommendation.  Any ebook purchased through an indie bookstore absolutely supports us.

Awesome. Back to Emily. Okay so it’s good to know that I can take DRM off if I want, but where can I buy non-DRM books?
Right now, Tor/Macmillan is the only major publisher that offers ebooks without digital rights management, but other big publishers will follow suit. Smaller publishers typically don’t put DRM on books because they can’t afford to but sometimes their distributors do, so you can get non DRM books if you buy from them directly. Oh and Emily Books. Emily Books, Emily Books, Emily Books.

Emily Gould is a bookstore owner, writer, and yoga teacher in New York.

And if people want to pay thousands of dollars for walk-on roles in vanity projects, let them!  Who are they hurting?  It’s not like the money people spend supporting The Canyons is money they’d otherwise spend supporting, say, my friend Kat Hunt’s movie What’s Revenge.  Or maybe they are — the dollars we all have to support the arts are finite (or nonexistent.)  But I would go crazy (crazier) if I let myself go around believing that Kickstarter — or success, in general —  is a zero-sum game.

Emily Gould chews over Bret Easton Ellis’s Kickstarter campaign and argues that it’s much more exciting to support an unknown than a someone with a big name. Which—I agree! I have given lots of single $5 donations to random Kickstarter campaigns simply because I thought an idea was interesting. Support the unknowns!

The amazingly talented Lisa Hanawalt drew this masterpiece based on Emily Gould’s piece. It is amazing. AMAZING!

I’ve tried to write the first sentence of this post about a hundred times now and it’s proving very difficult; it turns out money matters are incredibly hard to talk about. I think we found a taboo, you guys! Imagine: even here, in this adult-diapered medium, there’s a last bastion of self-revelation that’s untouched. I’m just stalling now basically. Okay, (deep breath) here goes.

In 2008 I got a book advance of $200,000, of which my agent took 15% and the IRS took approximately one-fourth.  Still, that’s a lot of money, even paid out in quarters over the course of several years, and for a few months after I got that initial check—for the first time in my adult life—I mistakenly assumed that I didn’t have to keep track of how much money I was spending. Because surely this good fortune was the beginning of more good fortune to come!  

There would be foreign rights sales, audio rights sales, fat old-school magazine payments for first serial rights when the book came out, maybe a film or TV option — not to mention all the paid teaching and speaking opportunities that having written the kind of book that a publisher would pay a six-figure advance for would undoubtedly bring my way.  And then, too, there would be another payment of the same amount or more money for another book, a book I couldn’t quite imagine and hadn’t even started writing, but would definitely be able to write in a year or less after the first book came out because what was I, lazy? No, I was quick, quick like a blogger!

Without whining or belaboring, I will just say briefly that precisely zero of these rosy fantasies came to fruition. Other stuff happened, maybe better stuff in the long run, who knows. My publisher, I’m sure, did the best it could. My book did the best it could. The U.S. economy did the best it could, or something. Please don’t imagine a pathetic little violin solo here. I’m not asking for sympathy, I know I’ve been lucky. I’m just saying, if you ever find yourself in a similar position—and indeed, a few of you undoubtedly will!—here are some simple rules to follow, all of which I broke.

1. Don’t live alone in New York City unless you have a full-time, high-paying job and plans to keep it for the forseeable future!

2. Don’t pay for your own health insurance!

3. No international travel, even if your boyfriend is living abroad for a year!

4. No therapy!

5. Don’t do yoga teacher training, it is so expensive and you will never make any money as a yoga teacher!

But wait, actually, you know what?  I’m glad I violated all of those rules. My year of working on my book pretty much exclusively while sometimes flying back and forth to Moscow and going to therapy all while renting my own apartment where I could have the furniture and stuff arranged any way I liked and if there were messes they were all mine—that experience was priceless. Well, it wasn’t priceless—I know exactly how much it cost (see above).  And it sucks to have spent all that money and to be broker than a joker now.  But if I had it to do over, I wouldn’t do anything differently… except for one thing.

I WOULD NOT BUY ANY CLOTHES. NOT ANY. ZERO CLOTHES. 

Owning my mistakes and ne regretteing rien is kind of my “thing,” but these garments are the exception. Some of these items were mistakes from the moment I walked up to the register. Others just wore out their welcome, or have context associated with them I can’t stomach now.

Also, I should state upfront, I have worn a thrifted button-down shirt or, in the summertime, an American Apparel t-shirt and the same pair of jeans or cutoff jean-shorts almost every single day for the past six years, so what I thought I was doing buying any of this gear is very mysterious.  Like for example:

Who doesn’t need a leather vest?  Oh wait, I know: everyone. Everyone doesn’t need a leather vest.  This is from that teenager store “LF” and it cost, oh god.  I think it cost $200.  I wasn’t hankering after a leather vest for weeks or anything either, I just saw it, tried it on, it looked good over whatever I was wearing that day or the mirror was really flattering or something, and I bought it.  Almost immediately afterwards I realized that zero of my outfits were improved by a leather vest and also this particular vest was, maybe because I bought it at a teenager store, an appropriate size for a teenager.  A small teenager. With a small ribcage. I want to keep my financial dysmorphia as separate as possible from my body dysmorphia but I will just say that it wasn’t until I saw a photo of myself wearing it—a photo taken by someone I don’t know during a panel I moderated at the Brooklyn Book Festival, which perhaps that selfsame helpful anonymous Internet person has submitted for use alongside my Wikipedia entry‚ that I realized: wearing an undersized leather vest makes a person look HELL OF LARDY.

(I know that I am not fat, but some clothing is more flattering than other clothing, and if we can’t speak frankly about that then we should just call it a day right now.)

Related: this dress. I bought it in anticipation of a holiday party, towards the end of my year of plausible potential-nonbrokeness, and I guess I wanted to send a message with it along the lines of: I can afford a nice dress.  Unfortunately the high waist of this dress bisects the broadest part of my giant ribcage and blouses out right below it.  A person with small shoulders and a tiny natural waist, aka the inverse of my body type, would look great in this dress.  ”Are you sure you should be drinking that?” said someone at the holiday party, pointing to the glass of wine in my hand.  It took me a minute to realize that what she was implying wasn’t that I was drunk, but that I was pregnant.

I was not pregnant.  I never wore this dress again. It cost probably around $300.

Wool cheerleader skirt from Opening Ceremony, more than $100.  Because a wool cheerleader skirt is a totally appropriate thing for an adult to own.  ”Simple Basics for Winter: A Wool Cheerleader Skirt,” Lucky magazine does not ever say. I blame this one on going shopping with rich enablers, lovely but irresponsible people who also encouraged me, during the same shopping trip, to purchase a 3.1 Philip Lim cashmere sweater-blouse that was adorable and genuinely luxurious and which I left hanging in an inadequately defended closet, the result being that it was consumed almost 100% by moths.  The moths refused to eat this skirt. We can only assume that they held it in contempt.

It’s also too small for me, but that seems besides the point.

This ethereal little number was purchased for the purpose of wearing to a good friend’s wedding, a wedding I had some trepidation about attending because my ex-boyfriend is even better friends with this good friend than I am and I was 100% sure that he would be there. He was not there. Also it was unexpectedly cold and rainy in spite of being a summertime outdoor wedding so I wore a jacket over this filmy sex-dress the whole time anyway.

Just looking at this dress now reminds me of how stupid I was to go shopping in anticipation of seeing someone I never wanted to see again. Also in retrospect it’s so obvious that this is not my style. Flowy, filmy, witchy sleeves are a perfect physical representation of the kind of girl I used to think I was, that mysterious, ringing-like-a-bell-through-the-night type. Wouldn’t you love to love her?

In a way it’s a relief to know myself better now and to know that I’m not a filmy wispy person.  However, this dress cost $250 and I will never wear it again.

I wore this objectively  awesome floral Betsey Johnson dress, a reissue of a classic Betsey style, to a lot of my book release events and readings and such. I bought it because it matches my book jacket.  I also wore it in this cute photo.   During all of those events I was nervous and I sweated a lot and now the dress, which is white, has yellow marks in the underarms that have thus far resisted all attempts at laundering (paging A Clean Person, kind of, but I’m pretty sure it’s hopeless).

Want to buy this dress? I’m pretty sure it’s historic.  I am going to say it originally cost $250 but, shudder, I think that’s actually a low-end estimate.

Why can’t I wear it again, you ask?  Uh, why can’t you wear your wedding dress again, jerk?! (Also the sweatstains.)

Oh and it made total sense to also buy the shirt version of this garment.  Sure! Why not.

Some other sundry purchases, not pictured here because I’ve already found a way to destroy or misplace them, include a pair of jeans bought at my anxious thinnest that for a hot minute I tried to alter by slitting the waistband in the back and a pair of No. 9 clogs that I had custom-made in red patent leather in a fit of amnesia about my inability to wear high-heeled shoes of any nature (I gave them away at a clothing swap). And there’s probably other stuff that, mercifully, I’m blocking.

I’m telling you about this in the hope that someone out there might be able to learn from my mistakes.  Or, if you’re a size 6 or thereabouts, you also have the option of wearing them.  Make me an offer!

Emily Gould would just like to point out that $200K is not very much money at all when you think about, for example, what some publisher paid for sTORItelling. Top Photo Credit: flickr/fullyreclined