Ancestral Femmes in CITY OF LAUGHTER: A Lipstickle

Temim Fruchter

I have never not worn lipstick. I mean, okay, this is plainly not true. I wasn’t born in lipstick, nor was I raised in lipstick, but when my childhood best friend and I started taking walks to the drug store down the street just to streak the colors across the backs of our hands and read the delicious-sounding names off the bottoms of each tube, I knew I eventually wanted to become someone who always wore lipstick. 

And so I did. I really started in high school, bypassing those delicious-sounding names for the highly affordable and very dark rust brown shade of Wet ‘n Wild titled simply #541A. I went through tube after tube, feeling naked when my lips weren’t caked in the stuff. It was automatic mystery. I was someone slightly else when I wore it, someone more adorned than I was ready to feel.

I’ve always had fat, colorable lips. They’re a feature of mine that I’m partial to. I stopped wearing lipstick for a number of years when my gender presentation skewed far more masculine of center, but when I came into the nonbinary femme gender presentation that feels like corporeal home to me now, I started with my lips. Not to sound like a gay cliché, but taking a crayon to them again after all those years truly felt like coming home. I was happiest and most myself in a bold lip—a true red, a dazzling violet purple, a shockingly dark berry, a summer coral. With this paint on my lips I have long felt most in touch with what bewitches and delights me most about being femme. Adornment, sensuality, boldness, abundance, and an I-dare-you kind of allure. And lipstick, too, feels like a bit of time travel for me. A perfect vintage true red can make me feel like a glamorous capital L lady from another time. A great shade of neon, along with an aggressive amount of volumizing hair product, teases out the 80s gay who favors massive shoulder pads and lives inside my soul.

My debut novel, CITY OF LAUGHTER, with its saturated pink inner cover and a jacket splotched with faces in shades of pink and red and burgundy and gold, is also one whose story and characters bear the imprint of my longtime lipstick love. It is a deeply femme story. More specifically, it is the speculative queer history of one European Jewish family, following the women in each of those generations—Mira, Syl, Hannah, and Shiva—across time and space, and tracing the ways they are connected by blood, secrets, and the same shape-shifting stranger over the course of a hundred years. Each of these femmes—and they are, in my heart, deeply femmes—is devoted, in her own way, to certain sensual and sartorial pleasures. Each moves through the world distinctively, with her own sense of color and texture. In this book, they share a world, but each lives in a different time, and a different aesthetic universe. It delighted me to think about how they might dress themselves, how they might paint their faces, and how femme might look for them in the time and place they were living. So for just femme & dandy, I gave them each a lipstick to wear:

Mira: For Mira to wear lipstick would be technically anachronistic and also probably out of character, but we’re in the world of the fabulous and speculative here, so I’d like to give her this lovely Primrose Lip Tint by Dryland Wilds. Mira’s wilds are the unruly and enchanted woods of shtetl-era Poland, not the desert, but I think she’d appreciate the whisper of color and the unusual fragrance, a touch of mystery full of botanical goodness. She’d wear it on her walks, and to her woods, and in the quiet of her bedroom, writing her life in letters to someone dear and far away.

Syl: Gucci Velvet Matte in Janie Starlet – Everything from the gorgeous packaging of this lipstick to its deep crimson red shade to its velvety matte intensity to its glamorous name screams Syl to me. Syl, appearing throughout the book in black and white photos, pursing crimson-red lips that seem to defy the lack of the color in the photos, reminds Shiva, her granddaughter, of a starlet. I like to imagine Syl getting into a body-hugging party dress, putting on a faux fur shrug, painting her lips starlet red, and clacking off on her heels into the mystery of some long-ago night.

Hannah: Mac Locked Kiss Opulence – Hannah would appreciate the reliability of Mac, an adult upgrade from the drugstore lipsticks and glosses of her youth, but a brand familiar enough to take a risk on. A mauve nude with enough intense coverage to say I AM WEARING LIPSTICK. Perfect for someone slowly emerging from a years-long monochrome, and someone whose future may or may not require kiss-proofing. Hannah wears this color and something with a bit of structure in the shoulders and suddenly feels more definite, and—let’s be real—far sexier than she’s felt in a very, very long time. 

Shiva: Clarins Joli Rouge Velvet in Joli Rouge – Everything about this lipstick screams look at me. Shiva, the youngest of the generations in this book, may be in the midst of an existential crisis, but she loves sartorial indulgence and intensity. She also loves a good matte, but I wanted to give her something shimmery and glossy here, and this red, touted here by The Kit as “Best Vacation Lipstick,” feels like the kind of adventure Shiva wants and needs. She may be a little unsure in the present of the novel, but when she’s one cocktail in and wearing something she loves, she can command an entire room, and this is the shade I imagine she’d do it in.