It’s equally important to me to point out that I wouldn’t have ventured very far with “My Balenciaga” if I didn’t have a deep fund of fashion knowledge to draw on. That comes from my love of the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, which made me seek out books and films on her and on fashion. Those gave me the belief that I could pull off a story set in a milieu of models and designers and a researcher tracing a dress’s provenance.
The story revolves around a dress that may be a Balenciaga, of course. But, more important, it revolves around a mother and a daughter and their relationship. The mother is a Filipina former model, who moved to New York—partly to escape the judgment of her parents in Manila—and raised her daughter (with the help of her sister) as a single woman. What drew you to this scenario?
I suppose you could say that this is a kind of “royalty-in-exile” story—a genre I have great interest in. In this instance, the “royalty” is the mother. She has been “exiled” from the glamorous precincts of her beauty and youth, and currently lives with her retinue: a sympathetic elder sister and a daughter whom she treats as a co-conspirator in her fantasies and fabrications. Instead of desultoriness—a common atmosphere in these sorts of stories—the prevailing mood is one of qualified happiness.
Here is a lesson I’ve taken from V. S. Pritchett, the master of qualified happiness (not that I could have told you, until recently, that I was “taking” anything from him, except pleasure in his words): Contra the writing-workshop wisdom, you don’t need conflict in a story. Maybe a “wrinkle,” a few minor complications, but no more. All you really need for a satisfying short story is a zestful spirit and nimbleness of language. And how much more zestful can you get than a character who puts on a Balenciaga dress to sit at her writing desk? That image would be right at home in a Pritchett story!
The mother was stunningly beautiful. The daughter, Lucy, refers to herself as ugly—and is called “beautiful” only after she gets a haircut and then wears the Balenciaga, which seems to make others see her differently. How does the physical disparity between Lucy and her mother affect their relationship?
If I wanted to take a photograph that would be emblematic of the relationship between the mother and daughter, I’d pose Lucy on a lower eye line than her mother. She’s gazing up, with a shy half smile, at her mother’s face, which is turned, per her model’s training, directly to the camera, challenging and coquettish, and with a nearly convincing pose of invulnerability.
Lucy has no interest in her father, even once she knows who he is. Why do you think that is?
Maybe Lucy understands that to make contact with her father is to breach her relationship with the person she loves most in the world? Maybe she understands, but doesn’t want to live with, the answer to this question: surely, her mother must have needed some financial help and must have told Lucy’s father of Lucy’s existence, so why hasn’t he made contact?
The death of Nora Aunor—a Filipina singer and movie star—sets the narrative in motion. Why does she play that role here? And was she an important figure in your own life, too?
I’ve said that what started “My Balenciaga” were those two words in The New York Review of Books. Equally important for me, with this story, is that I wanted to pay tribute to Nora Aunor, a lodestar of my youth, whose recent death made me reflect on the idea of inheritances, as well as shifting notions of beauty.
In the story, the mother and daughter remember Nora primarily as an avatar of their “vanished youths.” And, of course, Nora’s career of starring in weepies ties into the mother’s ritualistic crying at the opera, among other occasions.
The story begins with Nora’s death, in April of 2025, and continues through to the present moment, late winter, 2026. I began writing it almost on the heels of the New York Times running her obituary in May. It was July when I started. It would perhaps have been more logical to tell a story that runs parallel to the time of its composition (and appears in the magazine as soon as its story line ends) in the present tense. But as soon as Nora died, and as soon as I had decided that I was going to write a story that included her, there was no question but that I would use the past tense because the past tense so clearly evoked, for me, the lost world in which Nora belonged. She was my first experience of rabid fandom, but I read her obituary with a certain detachment; also with sadness, as much for Nora (dead at seventy-one!) as for me, that young boy in Manila who looked up to her, and also the adult who hadn’t thought of her in a long while.
