Arbiter of culture

Judith Thurman. Photo / Supplied

Judith Thurman is sitting in her New York home sharing a glass of wine and discussing Buddhism with a friend when I ring. They've just been to a four-hour teaching by the Dalai Lama, "A truly extraordinary experience just to be in his presence," she exclaims in dulcet New Yorker tones. "He spoke about compassion, the middle way ... It's very esoteric ... It's kind of like sunburn, it will develop. I will see how I feel tomorrow."

The ability to liken a teaching by the Dalai Lama to sunburn is typical Thurman. She takes a subject and leads you, as a reader, on a journey that is compelling, telling and personal. It's the reason why, for 20 years, she has been contributing to The New Yorker - a publication which every aspiring writer fantasises about being part of.

"We celebrated the Dalai Lama's message of emptiness by going to a thrift store after the teaching and buying Armani jackets," Thurman chuckles down the phone, giving away another clue about herself - her passion for fashion.

Thurman has, in fact, built her reputation on writing in-depth essays about fashion and the world's leading designers and couturiers - from Yves Saint Laurent to Rei Kawakubo. For years she covered the international fashion collections - not reporting on each collection, like most media, but looking for a deeper more intellectual theme to comment on. (This is a woman, after all, who packs a copy of Roberto Calasso's Literature of the Gods as her escapism while covering the spring/summer shows in Paris.)

"People say fashion is frivolous - and it does seem that way - but it's also not. Fashion goes back to the dawn of time, people have always adorned their bodies, it is a language and language of any sort interests me. Fashion has an important place in culture - as a social critic or cultural critic - which I think is neglected by serious writers; that slightly neglected stepchild aspect of fashion interests me. Plus there is the sensuous aspect of it. It is a beautiful spectacle and a great designer or couturier has a kind of eloquence."

But Thurman's wide-ranging curiosity and sharp intellect sees her exploring people and subjects far beyond the world of fashion. Hillary Clinton, Cleopatra, Anne Frank, Jackie Kennedy, tofu, performance art, pornography, paleolithic cave art - they've all been given the Thurman treatment. As a full time writer for The New Yorker, she writes around seven pieces a year, spending months (nine months in the case of performance artist Vanessa Beecroft) hanging out with and researching each subject. The result: amazing insights, woven finely with her own story, that take the reader on an entertaining and informative journey.

"I think of myself as a reader," Thurman explains when asked what tickles her curiosity. "I like to read people, read situations, I like to read other people's work ... And a reader is really a student. I think I am an eternal student. It's taking a subject, finding a focus and going as deep as you can. Part of the problem," she laughs again, "is, to paraphrase the Dalai Lama, 'the more you know, the more you know you don't know'."

Thurman left college and moved to Europe, where she "wasted plenty of time writing wine-dark [Sylvia] Plathian poetry in a bedsit" and worked as a cook and barmaid, before returning to New York. After publishing a series of profiles entitled Lost Women, she captured the attention of Gloria Steinem - "an incredibly glamorous and fierce woman" - who encouraged her to write what would become the award-winning profile Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller and the biography Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Collette.

Her most recent book, Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire. is a selection of her essays written for The New Yorker.

"As I read through 20 years of work, I realised the underlying theme of all my subjects was this avidity or hunger or desire - you can call it by different names - particularly in my profiles of women, and it is this desire which attracts me to a subject. It is desire as it is broadly understood, but sex is definitely a part of it."

She laughs about a column she wrote last week for The New Yorker about former Cosmopolitan magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown getting her "due as a pioneer of libidinal equality".

"Everyone jokes that I am The New Yorker's sex columnist, it's a sub-specialty of mine."

Her writing does have a sexy sparkle, never more so than when she's writing about fashion, which cracks along at an intriguing pace ... She describes Hollywood femme fatale Joan Crawford wearing Italian designer Schiaparelli as a "sinewy, chain-smoking, man-eating, social-climbing, scarlet-clawed screen temptress of the 30s" .

Thurman has a self-deprecating humour that puts everything in its place, like when she wrote at the end of New York Fashion Week about " ... the shock to my dulled receptors, moral and aesthetic, when I picked up the New York Times Magazine and realised that I had mistaken the cover photo of a heroic African nurse in the Ebola ward of a hospital in Uganda for one of [designer] Miguel Adrover's models".

She takes no prisoners - men's fashion is "militantly prosaic" - and can weave with charm, into a profile on the retiring Yves Saint Laurent, how back in the 70s she blew a week's wages on a skirt and joined the ranks of women "addicted" to his label.

"A lot of fashion journalism today is service pieces, and I don't do that. I was asked to write a piece for Vogue and they said what we do is "celebratory journalism", and I just have a problem with that. At The New Yorker we are very super-conscious about not writing anything puffy, most other publications are aimed at the advertising, it's not critical. Fortunately, I don't have to do that."

Roberto Calasso's Literature of the Gods Tickets are still available to hear Judith Thurman speak at The Auckland Readers & Writers Festival on Sunday, 11.30am-12.30pm, at the ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre, Queen St. $23. Ph: (09) 357 3355.