Wenceslaus Hollar, Moth and Three Butterflies, 1646, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0.

Though the print issues of The Paris Review are never overtly themed, it often happens that, in the process of poring over the prose, poems, art, and interviews bundled into each issue, we notice some inadvertently reoccurring motif. Bubbles, for example, or psychosexually fraught adolescent friendships. These motifs sometimes lead to web series accompanying the rollout of the latest issue, as was the case when, a few years ago, my predecessor Sophie Haigney launched Home Improvements. The series—inspired by the fantastically long and architectural first sentence of Mieko Kanai’s story “Tap Water”—invited writers to “consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction.”

The subject turned out to yield so many rich ideas and neuroses that the series went on well past the next print issue, ending only earlier this year. Not long after then, the writer Sarah Nicole Prickett reached out to say that, in an apt turn of events, she’d been rooting around in her home when she came across the draft of an old Home Improvements piece that she’d previously thought to be lost. It’s about beautiful clothes, old objects, and moths. As you’ll see from the ending, we thought it would work as the perfect postscript to the series or, depending on how things play out, the start of a renovation. 

—Tarpley Hitt, online editor

After my divorce, for the first time, I began to dress beautifully. My husband and I had been living in California, a temporary relocation that had brought about a nadir in my personal style. I still recall the embarrassment I felt when, after a bad car accident, I arrived in the hospital wearing a pair of brown suede mules, wide-legged light blue jeans, and a lilac long-sleeved T-shirt, way too big, advertising the music of Jimi Hendrix, an ensemble which looked horrific under the fluorescents and made me think twice about driving unlicensed.

California divorce law is a magical thing. Between the spring of 2020 and the spring of 2021, four payments arrived in the settlement, each as much as I had earned in a year. Having no intention of paying taxes on the settlement to the United States government, I contributed to the American economy at the retail level. I rented a one-bedroom in Williamsburg, a neighborhood I did not even like, because, suddenly, renting—as it had never been before—was easy. I paid off my sister’s student loans. I donated to mutual aid groups, and to individual fundraisers. I wish I could say that these were my biggest expenses, but I have a bad feeling that most of the money, in a time when everything was on sale, went to clothes.

Great clothes, clothes for a life as glamorous as divorcée sounded. The apartment was from a time between wars, handsomely constructed with wide plank flooring and seven windows. Central to the layout, and to my world, was a hallway with a built-in closet, not tall but surprisingly deep, with beadboard double doors and fifties filigree pulls. Nothing gave me more pleasure than to open both doors, as morning light filtered through the north and south windows, and look at the serried garments on their black velvet hangers, every one of them chosen.

Multiples of things. Having more of a thing than I needed, and so never having to risk being caught without, was a wish that went back to childhood, when opening a friend’s cupboard and seeing different kinds of cereal in their boxes, some even unopened, made me feel envious and ashamed.

Multiples … of black Balenciaga slim wool pants from the end of the Ghesquière era. Rick Owens fine mohair sweaters in chartreuse and vermilion. Striped oxford shirts with interesting details, from Prada and Martine Rose. Junya Watanabe skirts with manifold pleats: knife, box, and accordion. Hermès knit tops that were listed on eBay with no year and lowish starting bids, and that I knew, thrillingly, to be products of the Martin Margiela years.

And things that were necessarily singular. I waited months for a Chopova Lowena midi skirt to appear on the secondhand market. I found, from one of John Galliano’s first collections for the house of Margiela, an astonishing gold brocade bustier, really more like a plastron, backless and fastened at the waist by a grosgrain ribbon that bore to the rest of the garment the same relation as a string to a kite. I hunted down the two halves of a Yohji Yamamoto look from the maestro’s wedding-themed show of spring 1999, finding on one resale site the petticoated dress in mouse-gray pinstripe, and, on another, the morning coat, also pinstriped, in a harmonious shade of lead; together they were the colors of half-mourning. The dress was too tall for the closet, which was apparently built when women and their clothes were smaller, so it hung from the neck of my professional-grade steamer in the living room. Every time I looked at it, I felt more successfully divorced.

Then one autumn day in 2022, I stepped outdoors in a skintight wool bodysuit by Alaïa and high-waisted leather trousers by Yves Saint Laurent, both circa 1989, both in nearly the same shade of Hooker’s green, carrying a light plaid jacket by Junya Watanabe over my arm in case I had misjudged the temperature. Immediately I felt a thin whistle of air pierce my side. A hole the size of a dull pencil point had materialized—no, that can’t be the word; had antimaterialized—a few inches below my left armpit. My first thought, being a child of the nineties, was that I had gained weight. But I knew I was running errands on amphetamines and going to raves twice a week.

Two weeks later, another hole appeared near the first. Then holes in more things: a Comme des Garçons tweed bolero, a Romeo Gigli raw silk skirt. When holes appeared in my underwear, I knew that I had a case of moths.

I tried all the natural remedies—lavender, eucalyptus, cedarwood. Then the pheromone sprays. Then airing—one morning emptying the left side of the closet, every piece laid out in the light, my money right where I could see it. Then, the next morning, I did the right side. I vacuumed. I sprayed again. I learned to darn, which gave me some satisfaction: I was still my mother’s daughter. I wouldn’t consign a vintage Alaïa bodysuit to the bin over two little holes, and instead ordered embroidery floss from Etsy and learned to work a duplicate stitch. I was running out of money, but I was resourceful.

Meanwhile, I considered the origin of the plague and was forced to turn inward. Moths loved the same things I did. Pure wools and silks. Folded cashmere. Fluids, female bodily secretions, being closeted. The dark.

My bedroom was relatively small, but to me it was perfect. I have always thought a bedroom should be just as advertised: room for a bed. The one thing I could not do in bed was sleep, my insomnia was so bad; the Vyvanse didn’t help. So I painted the walls a deep blue-black, the color of the night sky in a smoggy city, and I hung blackout shades under black curtains, which I made from old black bedsheets, and that’s how I slept. In moth heaven.

One cold morning, I cleaned under the bed as a last resort, finding mostly dust but also, dust-colored, a gray cashmere sock that had been shredded to the lattice of a basketball net by my larval roommates. I flung open the curtains, reinstalled a bare bulb overhead, and faced my situation. There it was, a telltale trace of webbing on the wine-dark surface of an antique blanket I had purchased at a deep discount from a nearby dealer of “historical textiles”—discounted because of the pandemic, yes, but also because it was, let’s say, distressed. I loved its soft damage. I got what I paid for. Wanting to live like someone with an inheritance, I had inherited a curse. That was the day I caved to a grandmother’s remedy. The mothballs, like most things that are toxic, worked fast.

By the spring of 2023, the moth problem had abated, as had my shopping problem. In their place arose the unfixable. Fate never returns without a vengeance. Family tragedy—what other kind?

I moved upstate, to a place twice the size, the restored second floor of a late-Victorian manse. I thought that if I spent all my money, as well as some other people’s, on an apartment within driving distance of my former life, I wouldn’t lose my friends or my mind. I didn’t understand how much my life had changed. It was like I had seen lightning but could not hear the thunder. Then it was like I had heard the thunder but still believed I did not need a rain jacket—metaphorically, I mean. I had a literal rain jacket. It was Margiela, hung inside a garment bag in a wardrobe box sitting in the middle of my new living room, which felt more like a parlor. Belatedly I unpacked the lamps, the small appliances, then the banker’s boxes of broken-spined books. I hung the paintings from friends and exes, made the bed. The clothes I left for last.

When, a few weeks in, I opened the wardrobe box containing the black Balenciaga slim wool pants and the Hermès knit tops, out came something else familiar—a single flitting moth. I smiled. Yes, I felt beatific. I loved this moth, my shadow. And so I vowed not to kill it but to catch it, put it in a sealed container with a sock or two, and let it die happy. I was improved. I was no longer addicted to the waste-laying process of accumulation. I would spend my time writing, writing enough to pay for this incredible and enormous apartment, even better than the one I had before, so that my friends could come up one by one, two by two, and do residencies, cook with me. I would spend money at the farmer’s market and nowhere else, I would be less materialistic and a better materialist. I wouldn’t spend a whole morning shopping for more black Ann D. tank tops on The RealReal while watching YouTube compilations of Julianne Moore crying in movies. I was relearning to laugh.

That is not the end of the story. Later the same week I was standing in the kitchen washing dishes when I noticed a smell of dry leaves, which made me inhale and feel nothing—maybe gratitude?—until moments or hours later I looked and saw everything around me in a soft monochrome grain, as in a digital photograph edited to look like film. I had been in my head, but the change in the air restored my senses. First I felt that it was warm for fall with the windows cracked. Then I heard distant shouts and felt a sense of commotion. I moved as if dreaming toward the sound, toward the window in my bedroom that opened onto the street. When I looked out, I saw that the entire facade, and with it the wooden frame of the building, was on fire.

Sarah Nicole Prickett is a writer and editor who now lives in Montréal, Canada.