The Gentlewoman Autumn/Winter 2011 Issue 4 with the lovely Olivia Williams
There is nothing sweeter to the ears of a 15 year old girl than to be told that you are lovely. Lovely is about having rosy lips and cheeks and shiny hair and being as bright as a star. It's about being fresh-faced and, well, beautiful. But it's more than that too. It's about things that make you smile and warm your heart and make you inescapably happy. When I was 15 I longed, no - I yearned - to be lovely. I wanted to be one of those girls in Teen Vogue editorials in a sweetheart dress and heels (oh, to have a pair of heels!), with a boyfriend who kissed my cheek and held my hand, because that's all I thought it took to be in love and that's how I thought it always would be. Remember this was the time of Luella, and the heart-faced loveliness of Kirsten Dunst, and Lost in Translation. I used to take photos at parties and run them through an aging filter on iphoto. I covered my walls in magazine cut-outs and furiously read stella gibbons and bonjour tristesse and breakfast at tiffany's because those girls were lovely and I needed to learn their secrets. I tried out new words and phrases. Thankfully, "love you, mean it later" was lost to the ether. My friends and I were glued at the lips to our Smith's rosebud salve and we applied it with religious, almost sacred deference every hour, on the hour. I wore flippy skirts and lace shirts and ballet flats and I smelled like soap. I didn't own foundation. I still don't, actually.
When I met a boy, and he liked me, we went on what was my first solo date. We saw John Tucker Must Die and sat awkwardly side by side in a darkened movie theatre. All I wanted, all I desperately, desperately wanted was for him to put his arm around me. That's what you did with girls that were lovely. You hugged them close to you and kissed the top of their foreheads. We had hot chocolate (oh! hot chocolate!) afterwards and I waited for him to say something to me, only me. We talked in ebbs and flows, periods of silence punctuated by rambling dialogue that went unchecked. We were speaking to cover emptiness. I didn't know what to say. I knew what I wanted to hear - I wanted him to ask me out proper, to say "do you want to be my girlfriend", and I would nod shyly and then we would go to the formal together. The year 10 formal was the end point, see. My mum had promised to buy me my first pair of heels and there was going to be an after party and my parents had conceded that I would be allowed out till 12. I barely touched my drink and I smiled a lot. He didn't say what I wanted him to say. We parted awkwardly as teenagers do - him to be picked up by his mother, me to get on the 380 bus home. I bit my lip the whole ride as I listened to the arctic monkeys and wondered what I'd done wrong.
I'm not sure I was lovely, not that day. I was trying too hard. Loveliness isn't something you can manufacture, no matter how many Sofia Coppola films you watch or how many Jane Austen heroines you admire or how many Luella dresses you own (if any). I didn't know then that I didn't have to actually do anything to be lovely. I was 15. I was lovely. I had rosy lips and cheeks and shiny hair and I was bright as a star. I was really young, and even if I wasn't naive I had a simple way of looking at the world. I knew that I would be a writer and live in a cottage in Bath with the same dogged certainty that I knew that I would spend all my babysitting money on a pair of sass and bide jeans the next week. Sometimes, somewhere, amidst the piles of uni readings and tax returns and phone bills and used-up bus tickets I wonder what happened to that girl. I think I'd have to work harder at being lovely now. There's too much on my plate - between uni and interning and work and family and friends and life it's a constant juggling act that I'm only vaguely coping with. And the worst thing is, effort and lovely don't really go hand in hand. I was lovely once, I was 15. I think all 15 year old girls are lovely. And they don't even have to try.
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