When you work on a memoir - or even when you write in a diary - you are taming difficult memories by sealing them between pages and then putting them literally on the shelf. As I began my post-divorce story Busy Being Free, I was simultaneously unpacking the wardrobe I'd shipped over from my 20 years in America, having moved back to my hometown of London, the city that first 'shamed' me. We leave where we grew up for a reason. California, with its wide expanse of sky, had set me free. And yet, needing to be near my family, here I was. Many of the items I pulled from the cardboard boxes were quotidian. But there were a few that - as I held their fabric in fingers that would soon enough lose their LA tan - made me blush, laugh or cry.
THE MARILYN MONROE DRESS
A pale blue cotton wiggle dress with white Swiss-dot embroidery. I was looking for a dress to replicate one I’d seen in a photograph of a sleeping Marilyn Monroe
