LORELEI VASHTI Dress, Memory. Reviewed by Kylie Mason

An extraordinary collection of dresses inspires an extraordinary recollection of a young woman’s life. Memory is an individual thing. For some people, it’s a place or a fragrance that triggers a memory, for others it’s a word or an object. For Lorelei Vashti, her collection of dresses – so large it cannot be corralled into a single room, let alone a single wardrobe – is the tangible evidence of the moments that have formed and informed her life. In Dress, Memory, Vashti frames this memoir of her 20s around the dresses that defined each year: there’s the delicate, large-collared 1950s dress she wore to ask her boss for a raise, and the tasselled dress she bought in Turkey, which she was wearing when she fell in love for the first time. Her affection for her dresses is the one constant of Vashti’s 20s. She takes a selection with her when she moves from her childhood home in Buderim to Brisbane, and again when she leaves Brisbane for Melbourne, and then Melbourne for New York. Through studying and house sharing and being in a band and finding an office job, the dresses are a comfort and a kind of security: if she can choose the right dress for an occasion, she will truly be herself, capable of anything. But the dresses aren’t really the point of Dress, Memory; they serve more as inspiration and punctuation to a delicate and moving exploration of the author’s transition from the impatient teen ready for her life to begin to the experienced, erudite woman who has found her place in the world:

… in the dim cinema I felt brave enough to take on the city, dare it to stop me. I deserved this. The love, the largeness, the drama, and whatever else came with it. I didn’t feel like a baddie. I felt like the hero: I had found love. I had got it.

Vashti’s writing is eminently readable and she does not shy away from sharing her life: from the painful, confusing affair with a beguiling housemate and her desolate and desperate time in New York to the enlightening and empowering interludes spent in Thailand and India, she lays bare the events that have moulded her life:

I’d become so used to accepting contradictions and complexities and shades of grey – our entire relationship was based on prevarication. And I’d become comfortable with not needing to decide whether I was good or bad or right or wrong with him. We could exist one way in the murky night and another when daylight came.

The power of this memoir lies in the sensitive way Vashti handles the retelling of her own life and in the familiarity of many of her experiences to her readers – they will find echoes of their own lives in her experiences of looking for her place in the world. There’s power, too, in her use of her dress collection as a metaphor for growing up. The garments tear and gather stains, she outgrows them or dismisses them and it is in trying to figure out how to integrate her collection into the life she has made that she discovers the person she has always wanted to be. Lorelei Vashti Dress, Memory Allen & Unwin 2014 PB 272pp $27.99 Kylie Mason is a freelance book editor based in Sydney. www.kyliemmason.com You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here. To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.  

Tags: Australian women's writing, Lorelei | Vashti, memoir