All little girls love pink.

All little girls love pink.

Right?

Wrong.

Despite the rosy-tinted title and cover of my latest book, I must confess that loving the color pink came relatively late to me. It took an unusually, arrestingly beautiful and refined shade of it — similar to a Sweet'N Low packet but a trace more subtle and deep — in the form of an exceedingly "I must have you now, ma chere, or I will die!" 2003 Gap raincoat to make me say "Oui oui oui, take me now!" and embrace the pink. (I tend to lapse into French whenever I get excited. Consider my first name.)

My eyes are really bad. At age four, I was diagnosed with acute myopia and astigmatism, aka severe nearsightedness. At the optician's, there was only a tiny and very unfortunate handful of kiddie frames to choose from — this was, like, more than 30 years ago, so all blind girls' roads led to cat-eyes — and only two color choices: baby blue or pastel pink. I found both options criminally heinous and I began screaming. "I don't want to see the world through blue or rose-tinted glasses!" But lime green glasses? Now we're talkin'. Or how about peach ones? Or violet? Those are the kinds of dreamy colors that complement my coloring — reddish auburn hair, green eyes, fair skin, and freckles — and which didn't exist back then.  

Back to the Munchian double nightmare of baby blue or pastel pink. I was way too fashion-forward even at that tender age to have to face this optical Sophie's Choice. Why, why did I have to sacrifice beauty and harmony for sight and clarity? Why couldn't I have both? It was truly tragique. A cauchemar, if you will. A nightmare. Sometimes in life, though, before you're even old enough to have zits, you're forced to prioritize. So reluctantly, dispiritedly, abjectedly, I went with the ghastly blue frames that washed me out. They were crimes against nature and went against everything I stood for, but they, I told myself, somewhat unpersuasively, washed me out less and were less girlie and sickly-pale than the sissy pink ones. Besides, I was getting kind of tired of walking into trees and walls and heavy furniture. I was bruised all over all the time. I was also getting pretty tired, and so was my mother, of me constantly walking away with strangers. If my mother lost sight of me for a second in the grocery store, she'd inevitably find me tagging along behind a bemused female customer and her cart, asking, "Mommy, what happened to the box of frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts we just put in there?"

The good news was, I could finally see. I could see everything. I had vision. The good, clear, sharp kind that allowed me to individuate every leaf on every tree and if I walked into a tree it would be my, not Sophie's, choice.

Today, of course, no kid who needs glasses has to ever be placed in that limited position. She has thousands of wonderful, cool, truly fun frames to choose from, and gets to have the best of both worlds: fashion and practicality. I mean, if glasses are the solution to a visual problem, then why not solve the problem and look cute while doing it?

I think that concept is what drew me to the famous Little Pink Raincoat that inspired my book. It was a gorgeous, womanly, Audrey Hepburn pink and it kept me dry. It was also reasonably priced. In that sense, I'm a stylish democrat. If something looks great and fits well, then it's done its job. Price doesn't always dictate what will look best on you. I know plenty of American women who spend a fortune on their clothes and still, nothing looks chic. You can tell the outfit's expensive, all right — these fashion victims seem to think the rest of us have a burning need to know whose name designed the thing and thus unironically wear other people's names down their arms, across their rear ends, and wrapped around their ankles — but that's about all you can tell. Money helps but it doesn't always equal taste.

I learned that law up close and personal when I lived in France for a year during college. Parisian women do have that je ne sais quoi and I scrutinized them the way I scrutinized Baudelaire and Manet and Chanel — intently. What were these mademoiselles doing that I wasn't that made them look so much better than I did?

For one thing, they didn't wear names. Any names. On any part of their anatomy. And they had an eye. (I, by then, had les verres de contact, contact lenses, which isn't exactly la même chose, the same thing.) What's more, they had a trained eye, cultivated over centuries of what's considered eternally and universally attractive, and then they personalized that in unexpected ways that always worked. The clothes and colors and accessories they chose as well as the ones they didn't — and the surprisingly complementary combinations of them — were not only almost always high-low in price, but they were worn insouciantly, joyfully, playfully. (E.g., strands and strands of cheap and expensive pearls, and jeans, and ballet flats.) French girls may take fashion deadly seriously in private, but when they leave the house they want to feel pretty, relaxed, and nonchalant in their Gallic versions of my Little Pink Raincoat.

And you know what? I never once saw a single one of those crazy little French girls in blue cat-eyes. Or in pink ones, either.

But in lime green ones?

Absolument.

The perfect outfits exists, but does the perfect man? Little Pink Raincoat is a featured book in Fiction Readers, a group to discuss contemporary women's fiction, books, women's issues and much more. Click here to join the group.

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