KEY POINTS:
Blame Trinny. Blame Susannah. But I experienced an overwhelming urge the other weekend to purge my wardrobe of the unclean, the unfashionable and the ill-fitting. All well and good until I found, sitting at the bottom of my closet two large boxes of books. Heavy evidence of numerous house shiftings and a lack of bookshelves.
That's when things went pear-shaped (like my figure according to Trinny and Suse). I decided to sort through my books and get my literary look down to its elegant, functional best.
It was a lot tougher than weeding out my wardrobe, mainly because I have a million more books than clothes. In some ways, however, it was spookily similar. As with my fashions, some of my reading choices have been a little mortifying (yes, there really was a Dr Phil phase); some simply whims of a seasonal trend (Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger); but I found classy pieces I'd forgotten (Fay Weldon's The Bulgari Connection); and one or two one-off items I liked at the time, but which have never really gone with anything else (Miss Garnet's Angel by Salley Vickers, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd and the odd Elizabeth Berg).
Sadly, there was some collateral damage. Like bargain-basement plastic belts, some books simply hadn't stood up to the wear and tear of devoted use.
Of course, it's the keeping that's my problem. In the same way Carrie Bradshaw would never leave behind her favourite Choos and Blahniks, I could no more abandon Jane Eyre, Jane Austen and my out-of-print Helene Hanffs to make way for newer acquisitions. I did toss out all those doorstopper-size aeroplane reads as quickly as last year's zebra prints. As I did The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler; I mean, yes it's clever, but why bother with a knock-off when the originals are just so good? And it was time to shove Trinny and Susannah back into the closet; they certainly didn't belong on my shelves.
Clearly - and fortunately - fiction and fashion are not quite the same. For a start, eclectic tastes mix and match far more easily. While purists may despair of my copy of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird sitting alongside my Quotable Slayer from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I like it. And it's nowhere near as dire as wearing socks with sandals.
Fictional flaws are more readily hidden than figure ones, too: no one is ever going to know that stacked behind the Number One Ladies Detective Agency series is my Robin Owens sci-fi fantasy collection.
Precious Ramotswe doesn't mind the squeeze; she is, after all, a "traditionally built" woman.
But, best of all, from one season to the next, a girl's never too fat to fit into her favourite book.
- Detours, HoS
