Women's Interests II

Maribeth knows how to make me feel really old. She pointed out a jumper in my closet that I sewed in graduate school and said her mother sewed her one from the same pattern when she was in high school.

I feel sad for all the women who came of age in the era of Lucky. Magazines used to have editorial content beyond pushing the goods of their advertisers.

Salon wrote in an eulogy for Mademoiselle:

After 66 years of continuous publication, Mademoiselle had become little more than a product-pushing, "Sex and the City" fanzine, a far cry from the magazine that launched the careers of writers like Sylvia Plath, Truman Capote, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Chabon and Jennifer Egan -- and won O. Henry Awards (43) and a National Magazine Award for Fiction in the process.
Its disappearance from newsstands marked an official departure, but there are those -- editors and readers alike -- who believe that Mademoiselle died, along with a handful of other "women's glossies," when they stopped publishing fiction back in the 1990s. The move was seen by some media analysts to have been financially inevitable, but was interpreted by many in the worlds of media and publishing as a surrender to simplistic marketing instincts and a misinterpretation of readers' interests and aptitude.

Last Monday, I went out on disability because my health problems were taking up so much of my time and energy. On the upside, I have a lot more time to lie around and read. Naturally, I have opinions about what I read and will subject you to them. If I go a week without posting and you are wondering why, call my husband for news.