Whenever encountering Fran Lebowitz, I slightly imagine her as Eloise of the Plaza Hotel all grown up, were we to discover perhaps that Eloise’s absent parents were actually Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker. Like Eloise, Lebowitz is the kind of dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker that seems hard to imagine being anywhere other than Manhattan.
In 1991, however, Lebowitz gave Vogue a glimpse of her life in the country as a guest in other people’s homes. She and her friend Marc Balet contributed a few pages of back-and-forth about summertime to our August issue that year, which we have now digitized for the first time. A preview:
On choosing which weekend invitations to accept: I would prefer a household with children as opposed to other houseguests that I have not approved.
On road trips: I inherited my mother’s map-reading ability. I can’t read a map.
On ticks: I think they’re in the grass. So I avoid walking through the grass on the way to the beach, which is fairly easy if you avoid going to the beach.
When recently reached for comment, Fran described Balet as “a very good friend of mine who actually just moved from New York City to Connecticut.” Has she been to visit? “No, I refuse to go. I told him he moved too far away.” |
