It didn’t look like a book I’d trust, with its glossy, hot-pink cover decorated with whimsical daisies, a scrawl of a lipstick tube and a saucy cartoon woman holding three snazzy skirts. It looked like a dozen other curvy road maps to the Land of Style via little black dresses, long baths and a pair of heels that cost as much as a major appliance.
But “Three Black Skirts: All You Need to Survive” (Workman, $13.95), doesn’t skirt the issue of survival. Or any other issue, for that matter. Writer and illustrator Anna Johnson tackles loneliness, lint, lentils, liquor, lacquer paint, leather, low-paying jobs and, of course, the big L-word, love.
Johnson goes where every other sassy, exclamation-point-using, self-help author has gone–but she brings back much more interesting souvenirs. She talks about the drama of wearing red lipstick and then gives us the steps for removing it from the carpet. In the “Super Basic Wardrobe,” she lists three essential bras: “one to run in, one that looks pretty under white and one that makes your breasts look twice their natural size.”
Johnson thankfully doesn’t deliver her directions from the Mt. Olympus of Advice, where the resident writers always know more than their dry-skinned, yoga-deprived, poorly clad readers. She leaps off that crowded pedestal with this disclosure in the introduction: “Self-books tell you how to live. I can’t do that. I’ve got a diet built on raw watercress, strawberry ice cream, oolong tea … I can’t drive a car.” And the real clincher: “I don’t own three black skirts, only two.” (No word on whether Johnson goes without the skirt to seduce, the one to succeed or the one to slob out in.)
The Dalai Lama, Reader’s Digest, Simone de Beauvoir, Dr. Seuss, Jerry Hall and Homer are all sources of inspiration for Johnson. She takes as many hints from Heloise and Erma Bombeck as she does from Bette Davis. One glimpse at the bibliography and you’ll understand how she covers debt management, eyebrows, Prozac and party preparation in one 340-page book.
You can survive without this book, but where else would you get this shopping advice: Avoid colors that remind people of an airport in Florida or a hospital.