This past winter I survived the misery-months by reading all five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries. Many things happen in those diaries but the event that’s seared into my mind involves a new hat. It’s 1926 and the diary entry begins this way: “This is the last day of June & finds me in black despair because Clive laughed at my new hat, Vita pitied me, & I sank to the depths of gloom.” Oh, Virginia, girl —I feel you! The shame of wearing the too-big thing or the overly shiny thing or the thing that’s just wrong in every way for the occasion… We’ve all been there. And yet it had all started so well for Virginia: out on the town, on one of those free-wheeling London summer nights, heading to multiple parties with Vita Sackville-West, picking up friends along the way—and wearing this

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