After three years in the making, I’m so excited to tell you the book Dress, Memory: A Memoir of My Twenties in Dresses will be available from August 27, 2014.

Read a little more about the book here; pre-order and received a signed copy here!

Thanks to all of you for your support of the blog. I hope to see you at a launch in your town soon. Keep in touch on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

Love, Lorelei

Time makes things either more valuable, or just moth-eaten. I can never tell which way it’s gonna go.

I bought this at a vintage shop in Berlin in 2007 with my oldest friend, Andrea, who I met when we were both about five and we did ballet classes together. I hated those classes and quickly quit, but she never stopped.

Tiny white speckles, a constellation of memories.

Really early on, when she was still a coryphée, I saw her dance the role of one of the cygnets in Swan Lake—their glow, their bounciness, their synchronised head movements made me beam. I was so proud of her it brought tears to my eyes. It made me wonder where else one could possibly go after being a young swan?

(The obvious answer is a grown-up swan, but I didn’t really think of that then.)

Inside the shop in the dark afternoon, sputters of German conversation scattered about like little bonfires and warmed up the room. I tried on several way-too-expensive dresses in front of the only mirror.

I put this one on and turned this way and that, reaching high, my neck stretching like a duckling to discover the fit. I didn’t think it worked. Then I heard the muffled clip-clop of boots on the cobblestones outside, vivid and sharp as a ballerina’s footwork on stage when the music goes soft.

I looked up. Standing there outside the window was a woman and her little daughter, plaits hanging, grinning.

Their glow, their bounciness, their synchronised head movements made me beam. They were nodding and giving me their enthusiastic thumbs-up. What a shock every time you realise there actually is an audience out there in the dark.

I took the dress off and put it on credit card.

On those European streets, it feels like footsteps and years reverberate louder than anywhere else. Andrea and I clasped onto each other’s arms in the cold like cygnets; the dress bag slung over my shoulder like a wing. I would dread the arrival of the credit card bill, but at least we were still bouncing, glowing: synchronised movements after so many years.

Nothing lasts really, but there are things I hope to hold onto as long as possible, almost to the ground.

Spinifexcess: the state of native prickliness one feels when hit with an overweight baggage charge.

I was having a bumpy ride when I found this dress at a shop on Sydney Road years ago. I was overloaded with passion and grief, and the dress seemed so simple and smart, so stewardess-practical—exactly the sort of thing I’d never usually wear. So I bought it.

It’s decorated with a beautiful appliqué of olive and cream flowers, but is otherwise quite plain. However, the cool linen clings tightly around the hips like a seatbelt and makes you feel like you’re in a jeep, in the wild, on safari. A secret hunter.

Wow-ow: an awe and admiration so hefty it hurts, as for someone you love from afar and can’t have.

My early twenties. Speeding along, desperate to arrive at a place that felt right. I wore this dress to an interview for a job that might have given me a lift. I didn’t end up getting it, but just being in that office was exhilarating. When someone lets you in to a place that feels right, however fleetingly, of course you’re going to go home and dream every night about going back there.

Broochatter: the conversations you pin all your hopes on.

Many years later, when I was finally in a place I’d been trying so hard to get to, I threw this dress into a tub to soak and settled down to read Madame Bovary in the backyard. As the protagonist sank further into despair the dress remained crumpled in the tub, and when I remembered to pull it out a week later I was aghast. By then, Emma Bovary was dead and the dress was ruined: the buttons had rusted and the fabric splattered with permanent metallic stains.

Distraught, I banished the dress from my life. What a mess I’d made of everything. I couldn’t bear to look at it anymore, let alone wear it. I hid it at the top of a cupboard and tried to move forward. Hope drove me.

Emoticoncubine: a mistress who represents her lover’s current mood in a passively cute but meaningless way; an inadequate stand-in for a real feeling.

Earlier this year I pulled the dress out again. The stains that had been so devastating at the time turned out to be just tiny russet patches—barely noticeable at all. I can’t believe I ever thought they were such a big deal.

I’d been threatening to move to Sydney for years, so in late 2008 I arrived on a reconnaissance mission to decide whether or not I actually should.

I found the place magical. The sky was blue; the harbour exquisite. I sailed down rocky steps, imagining I might find a secret door carved into the stone, some sort of an opening. A portal to another time, like Playing Beatie Bow.

One day my friend Noe and I were walking in Surry Hills and this dress, the colour of a sunset, jumped out at me from a secondhand shop. It was too big and had stains all over it, and even though such things had never stopped me from buying a dress before I’d recently reached a new stage in my life: I didn’t want to keep repeating old patterns. No, I decided firmly. I don’t need any more ill-fitting, stained clothing in my wardrobe.

I put it back on the rack, but Noe convinced me that all it needed was some taking in and a good dry-clean and then it would be perfect. Besides, it was only $25!

She was right—I love this dress. It’s the sort of thing you want to wear upon arrival in a grand, new city, so you can fly down staircases with chiffon wings flowing behind you. Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face.

I took it back home to Mum who gradually fixed it up over the next couple of years. Our frantic fittings happened in bursts: any time I came home to visit we’d get a bit further along.

I hated the pinching and tucking and pinning of the darts. The worst part was under the arms as she folded the fabric in on itself—the tickle was excruciating. Don’t move! Mum ordered, teeth clenched, fang-like pins sticking out of one corner of her mouth as she concentrated.

But it’s boring and annoying to be told not to move. And even if you do do exactly what you’re told, you still sometimes get pricked anyway, even though you know she’s not trying to hurt you on purpose.

The fiery words that pass between women who are related, the tongues that whip and hurt and scorn and blame. Chin up. The wings that take you away and bring you back again.

In the end, I didn’t move to Sydney because I couldn’t find my way in to it; I couldn’t find an opening. Mum, of course, would tell me that in this dress I could make an entrance anywhere.

There are arms that will always wrap around you like a harbour. Then the orange glow of sunset.

Because fifties swimsuits hold that promise of being truly transformational. Blondes become Betty Grable; brunettes, Bettie Page. And if you’re a redhead you feel like an instant Rita Hayworth, which is one of the best feelings in the world.

I’m drawn to the fabric of this one. The tangrams of colour remind me of a cubist painting, a portrait of Dora Maar. I’ve worn it to dozens of costume parties, any time I had to pretend to be someone else.

That was always the drive: I wanted to dress up and act. I achieved my greatest theatrical success almost twenty years ago, as the Major-General in my primary school production of The Pirates of Penzance. We only did two performances, and in the first one I got a nosebleed at the start of act two and forgot my lines. I was embarrassed, devastated.

That night my older sister told me that no matter what happens on stage, you just have to keep going. Pretend every mistake is meant to happen. Incorporate it into the show.

So when my moustache fell off during the second performance, I turned to the audience and exclaimed: ‘Dear me! I seem to be moulting!’ I was an instant hit and I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to make them clap that loud again ever since.

The scariest thing about growing up is that you will go out into the world and expose too much of yourself—that people will find you totally ridiculous. But that’s the only reliable thing really: that someone always, always, always will.

That endless rocking back and forth between confidence and insecurity is like a lullaby. It should be a comfort.

So there you are, gliding in to the party, confident as Gilda: Sure, I’m decent! The audience adores you. But before you know it you lose your footing and you’re flying through the air. Your skirt flips up but you try to incorporate it into the show, pretend it was meant to happen.

And then, despite all your years of drama training, you can’t help it: you become the weeping woman. Legs akimbo, maudlin from drink, you lie there embarrassed, devastated, and muse that no-one gets you or your emotional cubism but if they did they’d see you’re obviously a masterpiece, goddammit, a Picasso!

So you keep holding your awkward, uncomfortable, ludicrous pose with a defiant pout until one of your friends helps you to stand up on your feet and takes you home for a cup of tea. And that’s the only reliable thing, really: that one of them always, always, always will.

In our crowded bedrooms, make-shift milk-crate cupboards overflowed with slips and stockings.

I took long baths in the daytime and listened to Rumours on cassette repeatedly—when it stopped I turned it over and pressed play again. I worked three days a week to pay rent and the rest of the time swanned around the house in this lavender peignoir, pretending, I guess, to be Vivien Leigh.

(The fabric is synthetic and can occasionally conduct static electricity; I’m sometimes scared of moving around in it in case I get a shock.)

There was always freshly spilled wine on the carpet, and we lavished layers of salt all over it to try to draw the stains out. A gritty crunch was always underfoot.

I didn’t know how bad everything was because I was on antidepressants. At the same time I knew exactly how bad everything was, because I was on antidepressants.

We looked after our friend’s poodle, Stella, for a week or two, taking turns to walk her to the park. One morning I saw a bunch of news reporters outside a dilapidated shack near our street: a kidnapped baby had been abandoned there and was found alive by a passing jogger. I was jealous that I hadn’t found that baby myself—it could have so easily been me!

My ambitions were obviously at an all-time low that year.

On the morning of my 24th birthday I wore this dressing gown and sailed out into our long, narrow garden for a picnic breakfast. My housemates made pancakes and bought champagne and strawberries, and Stella bounced between us all excitedly. In the photos we’re all being silly and grinning in every shot.

Years later when I learnt that one of our housemates had killed herself, I felt that same familiar wretched sorrow I’d left behind when I moved out of that house. It ruffled itself around my chest and wrists, ruched my forehead, crimped my lips. Static. I felt too scared to move in case I got another shock.

In five years I lost five friends to overdoses and suicide. That crunching sound in your temples when you find out, the brain trying to trample the news as the memories spill over and stain. You cry a lot, but salt doesn’t work: it never did.

I arrived at my brother’s place at the start of the monsoon, when we had to wade through knee-high water to reach the rickshaws from our front door. We drank lassis at the German Bakery and at sunset we sat on the balcony sipping Bombay Sapphire, watching the sky get crushed into a syrupy cassis.

Then my brother went away for summer and I was left on my own. I read three volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu and cooked up magnificent curries with chapattis and raita. In the late afternoon, as eagles outside stitched up the day with soaring needlework, I sat in the rocking chair and started to mend my own memories like an old woman. I tore them up and sewed them into a better fit. I glamorised the past and fantasised about the bright future—everything would be so different when I got back.

The humidity got right down into my bones, sucked me dry. I closed the doors, turned on the air-conditioning, shut the noise of the world out. Turned the stereo up and screamed along to the songs. The sound of my voice was all I had so I listened to it.

I got sentimental. The familiar sad yap, the nip at my ankles had followed me there—I didn’t know how to make it scram. My mind kept going back to this dress, my war bride. I found a tailor’s shop on Mahatma Gandhi Road, where croaky sewing machine motors barked in unison, and I asked to have three colourful copies of the dress made, exactly like the old one. Each one came back gorgeous, perfect.

By the time I returned to Australia they were already falling apart. I threw this original dress back over my head and tried to wriggle into it, but of course I couldn’t do the zip up; it didn’t fit anymore. I blamed the chapattis and raita.

Not long after, a bomb exploded in the German Bakery and killed seventeen people. I heard the news over Facebook—my brother had been sitting a hundred metres away at the time but he was safe.

I closed my computer, pushed back my chair and stared down at my feet, blinking away tears. The brand name ‘Singer’ was woven into the base of the old sewing machine table I used as a desk. Below it, the pedal that makes the machine move, and then further down on the ground I could feel that thing was still at my heels: my past, my pet.

I gave it a little pat and told it to stay.

I was at university. First year. I saw Psycho for the first time after sneaking into a film lecture, and it was there I found out about volunteering to work at BIFF—the Brisbane International Film Festival. I phoned them up and began what turned into a four-year term as a platinum blonde cinema usher.

I was given a torch and a walkie-talkie, modern-day sceptres of power. I could throw 14 year-olds out of MA 15+ movies if they weren’t accompanied by a parent or guardian; I could do anything.

All my friends could do anything, too: music, performance, painting, fashion. They all ran student newspapers and music venues and did crazy art projects, living together in an enormous, sprawling house where The Delinquents was shot a decade before. Our interests included, among other things, Gertrude Stein and Lichtenstein.

First year. It was the first time I became vegan, which led to the first time I was rushed to hospital with malnourishment. It was the first time I had to be fed through a drip in my arm—the first time I had made myself sick.

Then came the first time I heard Horses and the first time I slept with someone else’s boyfriend. The second time I had made myself sick.

The first time I spent a lot of money on a dress was to buy this, an original Harvey Graham, to wear to a BIFF opening night. The bust is decorated with gorgeous, tiny scalloped pleats that make you feel puffed up, proud, like a bird.

Tippi Hedren was a special guest that opening night—Hitchcock’s Tippi, who didn’t want to be the next Grace Kelly but, rather, the first Tippi Hedren.

But something comes first so that something else can come after it, like the individual panels of a comic book. Life is art. The speech bubbles flap above your head like sparrows. You run up a staircase chased by time, the trenchcoated pursuer. You move forward, up, away from the past and into the thrill of darkness. Life is suspense.

Then the whaam, pow, crack! Years later you read in the newspaper that they’re going to demolish the Regent and turn it into apartments. They’re keeping the staircase though.

I don’t know why but I always remember that staircase being so, so long.

The melody haunts my reverie.

So long.

I became steadily single years ago and moved far away. I moved to places where it’s virtually impossible to meet anyone new, like Brisbane and India and my parents’ house. I tried to do my tax return but ended up auditioning for NIDA instead. I didn’t get in. I cried and then bravely pulled myself together.

Haunted by the appearance of early-blooming bunions on both left and right feet, I got obsessed with fitness to distract myself from my impending spinster doom. I started wearing singlets as real clothes, not just as gymwear. I got really into hip-hop as a result of working out so much because, you know, the beat. I scored weed from some dude down the road so I could better appreciate hip-hop, then I stopped going to the gym so I could better appreciate weed.

I reminded myself it wasn’t too late to turn my life around. I bought a heart rate monitor as a motivation to keep my heart rate above 140 when exercising. I tried to keep my heart rate above 140 even when resting, just as an extra challenge for myself. When my mum asked me Where did this Type A personality come from, I explained I’ve always been this way and if she’d ever taken any notice of me she’d know that by now. Then I blamed her for my bunions, which everyone knows are genetic, and haughtily hung up. I cried and then bravely pulled myself together.

I reminded myself it wasn’t too late to turn my life around. On New Year’s Eve I threw on this dress and found someone to pash, but knowing I was still too raw to show the most painful, ugly, buniony parts of myself I went home alone. I checked my heart rate and it was at 290—a personal best. I felt smug, and then I freaked out because actually noone’s heart rate should ever be at 290. When I finally fell asleep it was for a very long time.

When I woke up on the first afternoon of the new year, I saw this dress lying crushed on the floor. It smelled of cigarette smoke and perfume and looked like a huge, crumpled petal: used up, fading, wasted.

But it’s the sort of dress that will magically uncrinkle itself when you pick it up off the floor, so I got out of bed, haughtily hung it up and reminded myself it wasn’t too late to turn my life around.

It was strange to come home to a house that wasn’t mine. I was used to having my memories built up in one place, one on top of the other. So many layers. Our sandpit, which had become a long-jump pit and then a pet cemetery before it was turned into a pretty patch of petunias when my sister got married in our backyard.

But the new house was filled with all our old, familiar things. I was glad to see the long wooden table, where the six of us ate dinner every night before my sisters left home. Mum would clear the plates and then set up her sewing machine on it, tablecloths of fabric spread out waiting for her to transform them into beautiful dresses: straw into gold like Rumpelstiltskin.

I never had an old-fashioned debut like my sisters because my school took it away on grounds of political correctness. Instead, we had a presentation ball, where we could wear any colour dress we wanted. I was devastated because it didn’t seem anywhere near as grown-up or sophisticated.

I was a 16-year-old, foot-stamping, Scarlett O’Hara-type, a petulant child trying to be an adult. Mum indulged me. Across the wooden table she spread out some satin bedsheets, the colour of daffodils, and turned them into a magnificent, flouncy, strapless, Southern Belle ballgown. I loved wearing it but it was like playing dress-ups, not grown-ups.

How long does it take to come of age? I wore this silly, frothy, voluminous debutante dress I bought secondhand, to Dad’s sixtieth. No idea why.

So many layers.

The guests filled up the new house and overflowed out onto the neat apron of lawn. These were people who had known me as a child: distant relatives and former babysitters. I got sick of telling them that I wasn’t married, that I don’t have any children, and I sat at the kids’ table for the rest of the day.

Before I flew back to Melbourne, I drove past our old house, now crowded in by ugly developments. Daffodil yellow bulldozers were planted into the landscape to tear up the last of the trees.

I wanted to bawl like a baby or throw a tantrum like a toddler when I saw what had become of my childhood home, but like a proper adult I just looked straight ahead and drove past it.