DISPATCHES FROM THE GILDED AGE

A selection of sparkling essays by a great Southern wit, foodie, fashionista, and prose stylist.

Reed (1960-2020) was a 19-year-old undergrad at Georgetown when the headmistress of her former boarding school killed the doctor who created the Scarsdale diet. An editor Reed had interned with at Newsweek remembered the connection and sent her to cover it. So began a brilliant career. The breezy foreword by Roy Blount Jr. fails to tell the novice a few things that bring the joys of this sampler of Reed's magazine work, dated and organized by theme, into sharp focus. The details about Reed’s death, following a long battle with cancer, affect one's reading of the essays she wrote that year, hilarious accounts of her "first world problems" during the pandemic—e.g., pest infestations; the complexities of quarantine cooking and dining. "On Mother’s Day, [my mother and I] sat at opposite ends of my outdoor table and shared a rack of lamb with an inspired mint sauce,” she writes. That was their last Mother's Day, and they both knew it. Her decision not to mention her illness in this or any other essay that appeared in her long-running column in Garden and Gun recalls Nora Ephron, another seemingly candid but actually quite reserved personal essayist always ready with the bright, deflecting wisecrack. Similarly poignant are essays that touch on Reed’s friendship with André Leon Talley, the late Vogue editor at large and kindred spirit. Talley helped her order her trousseau for a huge Mississippi wedding she cancelled at the last minute in 2011—then took the honeymoon anyway, she and her ex-fiance joining Talley and other friends in Paris. Also preserved in this collection are prime examples of Reed’s droll, incisive writing about her Southern roots alongside puff pieces on the Bush twins and surprising angles on Nixon, Cheney, and others. As Blount points out, Reed was “a Republican—of a decidedly secular, anti-Trump, anti-death-penalty, gender-and-race-friendly, Delta-proud variety all her own.”

There is life after death—at least for an essayist with this much verve on the page.