A Preface

Why I am starting a newsletter on beauty, baking, and books.

I am, at heart, a bit of a dork when it comes to beauty and skincare. I like baking when I can’t do my own work. I like to read recipes and make them in my head to relax. And books inevitably make their way into my conversation. So this is a newsletter of all three of these interests, mostly recommendations. I have no other ambitions for it. It will be free.

Cy Twombly’s Rome residence, by Horst P. Horst for Vogue Magazine, 1966.

I stole the name from a Clarice Lispector short story about a sad housewife who looks at a bouquet of beautiful roses and impulsively decides to give them away:

And also because a pretty thing was meant for giving or receiving, not just having. And, above all never just for ‘being.’ Above all one should never be the pretty thing. A pretty thing lacked the gesture of giving. One should never keep a pretty thing, just like that, as if stowed inside the perfect silence of the heart. (Translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson, Clarice Lispector: Complete Stories, New Directions.)

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