A longtime creative director of Ralph Lauren, Mary Randolph Carter is an icon, but there’s a good chance she’ll be introduced to an entirely new generation of fans with Live With the Things You Love: And You’ll Live Happily Ever After. This book is a fresh, welcome antidote to the slick, consumer-driven, retail therapy vibe that seems to dominate interior design media. Live With the Things You Love celebrates all the stuff you already have, and it treats each person’s home as a type of personal museum. Each chapter is devoted to a different home and inhabitant, and the inventory of their possessions unfolds like a personal archive. A plate that artist Keith Haring drew on for model Bethann Hardison when they had dinner together in the 1980s is among many works of art by personal—and famous—friends in Hardison’s New York City apartment. A small ceramic pumpkin made by painting teacher Willie Binnie in second grade now functions as an incense holder in his lodge-style home in the northwest corner of Massachusetts. These mementos are wellsprings for the kinds of idiosyncratic, fascinating stories that Carter is so talented at spinning. The Nantucket home of designer Janet Russo has a kitchen window lined with postcards collected over the 20 years she and her family have lived there, and is framed by an embroidered curtain valance that Russo bought from a flea market in Florence. As Carter explains, this is par for the course in a kitchen full of “a chorus line of whimsical objects with no culinary purpose, except to distract and delight the eye of the person appointed to boring dishwashing duty.” That celebration of the mundane but beloved is the heart of Carter’s book, and her entire philosophy for living.
Valiant Women is a vital and engrossing attempt to correct the record and rightfully celebrate the achievements of female veterans of World War II.
