“I made a huge mistake. I bought an apartment. It’s a great New York apartment: sunlight, views, cozy kitchen, very grown-up, very glamorous. It’s everything a real estate broker could want for a girl. Except when you’re a girl who really wants to live in a hotel.
For one blissful year between apartments, I was Lulu at the Lowell. The Lowell Hotel is conveniently located on Manhattan’s fashionable Upper East Side, just three blocks from Barney’s, one block from the Colony Club, and about fifteen blocks from where I grew up. It’s definitely a Freudian something to move into a hotel in your own backyard.
I’m simultaneously much too old and much too young to live in a hotel. Eloise lived at the Plaza because she was six and had no other choice. Ancient countesses retire to the Palace Hotel in Lausanne to wear tiaras while watching Italian TV game shows with other haunted aristocrats. But I am neither fallen aristocracy nor someone left behind to live with nanny. I was just a writer with a few personal decisions to avoid and professional deadlines to make.”
- Excerpted from Shiksa Goddess, Essays, by Wendy Wasserstein, copyright 2001, Vintage Press, New York, New York