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The Story Behind 'A Vintage Affair'

A Vintage Affair bookcover
A Vintage Affair will be published by Random House in hardback June 22, 2010.

I've always been fascinated by the idea that when you're buying a vintage garment, you're not just buying fabric and threads - you're buying a piece of someone's past. I've never been able to look at a vintage dress without wondering about the woman who first wore it. Was she married or single? Did she work? Did she have children? What were the main joys and struggles of her life? So when I began to plan A Vintage Affair I knew that it was going to be a book about the stories that vintage clothes might tell. It then became a story too about the way in which beautiful clothes can transform us - not just outwardly, but from within. In her shop Phoebe has four gorgeous prom dresses - 'cupcake' dresses - each of which is to change the life of its new owner in ways that that woman could never have foreseen. But the story is ultimately about restoration - not just of the clothes, but of the soul. For while Phoebe lovingly restores these clothes to their former glory she's all too aware there's something in her own life that can never be restored: her best friend, Emma, has died, and Phoebe feels responsible. But then comes the chance for redemption, in the shape of a child's blue coat from wartime Provence. This is the one garment that Therese, an elderly French woman with a collection to sell, will never part with. In 1943 Therese, then 12, had promised the coat to her best friend, Monique, a Jewish girl who was in hiding: instead, Therese inadvertently betrayed her and has lived with the guilt ever since. This part of the story has its roots in my own family. When I was eight my grandmother told me that her best friend, Helene, whom she'd studied with in Paris, had been 'murdered'. I was too shocked to ask why or how, and it was to be a few years before I learned that Helene, fleeing Paris for Lyon, had been arrested in February 1944 and killed in Auschwitz a month later. My grandmother often spoke of Helene, and did so not just with sorrow, but with a kind of remorse, even though she could have done nothing to help her friend and didn't know what had happened to her until after the war. I know that this is what underlies the wartime part of the novel which, like the contemporary part, is about friendship betrayed. But the story is redemptive: I always try to give my characters the second chance that so often eludes us in 'real' life. And in A Vintage Affair it is beautiful old clothes, lovingly restored to new life, that are to provide the threads of hope.