Status Updates From One Woman Show: A Novel

Very interesting perspective on dramatizing a privilaged woman's life in the early 20th century through museum title style.
It was difficult to read at first but the artistic details and particular vocabulary kept me going. It's those thoughts that run in your mind about how WASP lived and thought in their privilaged rich lives.

Essentially formed in the jocular idiom, George is traditionally rendered in the manner of companionable third husbands.
While not the fizz of any party, he is a welcome guest, an enduring accessory to Kitty's ever more callous temperament.
Like a sterling silver knife rest, he serves as a decorative prop to support an increasingly sharp slicing instrument.

"While a garniture is lovely and certainly appropriate in many a sitting room, porcelain is always most desirable in pairs. Only a true masterpiece can stand alone."
Bitsy Plimpton, in her lecture "Decorating for You" delivered at the Colony Club, 1945

Kitty's what you'd call an acquired taste. Ur mother made us buy that crazy painting in Paris. We walked into this place &Every painting was a mess, all these muddy shapes, we bought one & u hung it over the fireplace &that will be that. not worth the canvas it's painted on. ur mother is desperate for a Mayflower connection-so u married her &we put her in the apartment &that will be that. That's your verisimilitude

"for Kitty tried, but she could be nothing but American," Romaine recalled to Lady Troubridge.
"She reminds me of those dreadful English vases covered in swags and gilding 'in the French taste,'" Lady Troubridge replied.
"What a curious contradiction to steal every detail from the French and somehow achieve an effect that is completely foreign to France," Romaine continued. "I also think she took my pocket watch."

A member of Kitty's original garniture, Sissy engages in the unfamiliar work of standing as accessory to Kitty's centerpiece. She has long considered Kitty of inferior provenance despite their equally balanced proportions &related manufacture. Their formal relationship is one of obligation, ornamented w/competition &a hint of unsettled history.

The Surrealist movement takes hold in Europe, &Kitty considers her own dreams. She imagines herself running, tumbling, moving faster &forward fr sth-fr herself, on her shelf-spilling into some boundless void All her fantasies involve freedom, all her desires spin fr the seduction of compositional instability, a fierce longing to be distinctly un-decorative in the tradition of Artemisia Gentileschi's heroic femininity