Caroline Seebohm on the Late Alison Lurie
Interior Decorating.
Alison Lurie [pictured left] was very interested in English people, so when she met me on my arrival in Ithaca in the 1980s, she was nice to me. She liked the fact that I was a fledgling writer and we talked a lot about books, particularly English novels about which of course she far more knowledgeable than I was. She soon noticed I was not doing well in Ithaca. I was not an academic, therefore spurned by the Cornell community. I was equally spurned by many of the non-academic wives, because I wore shoulder pads – quite fashionable and fun at the time in New York, but utterly scandalous in Ithaca. I was quite lonely, even after I took out the shoulder pads, and Alison would take me to lunch and commiserate.
I confessed to her one day that I was too depressed to go on struggling to write a book and was going to try to become, instead, an interior decorator. “Fine,” she said. “Why don’t you redecorate my bedroom?” I was thrilled at this delightful suggestion, and started hanging out in her bedroom (which was quite an ordinary bedroom for such an unordinary person), taking photographs and measurements and pacing the floor. After much anguished thought I decided that the overall color scheme should be navy blue. Navy blue, I thought, was chic, understated, the color of night (suitable for a bedroom) – and hadn’t Vogue diva Diana Vreeland said that “pink is the navy blue of India?” (don’t ask). Moreover, navy blue carried a whiff of English boarding school uniforms that by then I knew she would appreciate. The room was duly done over in navy blue – curtains, walls, bedspread, rug. Alison paid all the bills promptly, and professed to like the result.
Alison’s bedroom was my first and last decorating assignment. Shortly after, I went back to writing and published a novel. We never mentioned the decorating again, although we met often over the years in London and New York and Key West. I had thought that she might use the navy blue bedroom in one of her clever, acerbic novels, but perhaps she was too polite.
Caroline Seebohm 12/ 6/ 20