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one thing that nothing could be done about, it was her height, and fairly early on she made peace with it.
    Her practical nature asserted itself, and she realized she had a choice. “Why languish as a giantess when it is so much fun to be a myth?” she wrote in her diary. She may have been whistling in the dark, or practicing a sassy attitude, but she seemed to have understood, even then, that a girl could choose to behavein a way that would distinguish her. Perhaps that was her only choice, given the alternative was to “languish.” Still, given how sociable she was, how free-spirited and energetic, she knew this was something she could pull off. By sheer force of her personality, she could escape her fate.
    Years later, she could joke about it. When she and Paul moved into their apartment at 81 rue de l’Université, their bed was so short, Paul built an extension, about which Julia said, “At last, I could fit my size-twelve feet comfortably under the covers, rather than have them sticking out like a pair of gargoyles.”
    Once in a great while, she was distressed by the way she looked. As she was rounding the bend to forty she would write to Avis DeVoto that whenever she read
Vogue
she “felt like a frump … but I suppose that is the purpose of all of it, to shame people out of their frumpery so they will go out and buy 48 pairs of red shoes, have a facial, pat themselves with deodorizers, buy a freezer, and put up the new crispy window curtains with a draped valance.”
    Julia was able to deconstruct the disingenuous motives that drive women’s magazines with the ease she normally reserved for deboning a duck, seeing quite clearly that while ostensibly offering inspiration and useful advice, the stories and articles quietly pummel the reader’s sense of self, the better to drive her into the arms of the advertisers.
    What is most instructional about this little anecdote, however, is that even by average woman standards, Julia’s sense of style was pretty basic, mostly because how could it be otherwise,given that it was next to impossible to find any skirts, trousers, blouses, or jackets in her size. Even with the help of a series of good tailors, the pickings in the shops and department stores were slim. Only when she read
Vogue
did she feel a little frumpy, even though, in actuality, she was a lot frumpy. But her ability to accept, work with, and even celebrate her own idiosyncrasies made the truth of the matter irrelevant.
    Change nothing.
    One of the trends that caught fire in the wake of the most recent global recession is the Buy Nothing movement. It goes by a variety of names—The Compact, the Minimalists * —and there are various cells and offshoots, but the point is to reduce debt and clutter, to recycle, reuse, and simplify, and also to help defuse our panic over having no disposable income, or perhaps any income at all.
    There are the inevitable blogs about living a year without buying anything, and websites where people post about their experiments in growing and canning their own tomatoes and using the recycled newspaper from Starbucks as toilet paper, and also, confess when they “slip.” A whole argument can be made about how the health of the global economy relies on consumers breaking down and buying a pair of shoes once in a while ratherthan foraging for them in the Dumpsters behind the dorms the day after the students have gone home for the summer, but that’s another polemic for another time.
    Inspired by the Buy Nothing people, let’s resolve to Change Nothing about ourselves. By now, most first-world women don’t even need to go online, pick up a magazine, look at a billboard, or turn on the TV; we’ve completely internalized the message that everything about us can be improved, and that if we’re not actively working on the endless remodeling project that is Us, then we lack self-esteem. That every last one of us can and should be thinner, firmer, smoother, more radiant, more