EDITOR’S LETTER
“As each writer attests: eureka moments hit when you least expect THEM”
Editor-In-Chief Farrah Storr on defining moments of change in life, and how to approach the next chapter
The summer months have always felt like an annual ‘pause’ to me. People tend to look slacker in the shoulders by July. Car stereos are turned up higher. There are giggles on trains and grown men appear, almost toddler-like, in their holidaybought shorts on every street corner and at DIY barbecues. Summer offers us punctuation in our lives; one we have been waiting for all year long.
The act of pausing, however, is not always one of calm. For many, a brief stop in the road can feel disorientating, as you move between two phases of your life: the now and the next. In her brilliant essay on p74, Abigail Bergstrom, former head of publishing at Gleam Titles, examines what it means when you leave a part of your life behind, but have not yet found the next chapter. We can all identify with this feeling of being betwixt and between. At various points in our lives we have all felt it – after graduation, changing jobs or even calling time on a big relationship. In fact, for most people, the past 17 months have been one long, interminable limbo, as we close the curtain on one way of life and wait for a post-Covid one to greet us. But, Abigail argues, the promise is perhaps not in finding the next phase of our lives, but in existing in the beautiful ambiguity.
Finding the next chapter is something several writers examine on p80. The thing that binds them together: their moment of clarity happened amidst the mad scrum of a party. As each writer attests, eureka moments hit when you least expect them. Crazy Rich Asians’ author Kevin Kwan found clarity at the end of a society party on New York’s
Upper East Side; while Elizabeth Day found hers at a book launch. Which sounds to me like a perfect excuse to head into the thick of it this summer.
Finally, someone who is certainly between two worlds is our cover star, Alva Claire. The 29-year-old Londoner took fashion by storm last year when she walked the Versace SS21 show. Here was a vision who stood out for her breezy, down-to-earth attitude. ELLE Fashion Features Editor Sara McAlpine was lucky enough to steal time with her before she headed back to New York and, one suspects, the next, stratospheric level of her career.
This is the July issue of ELLE, for those who understand that life truly happens when you’re not planning for it.
THEnext CHAPTER