The Heap has a life of its own. The ground floor is for grandparents, the first floor is for family, but the attic is for the Great Heap of Clothing. It absorbs and hoards, digesting some items like compost, only for them to re-emerge in spring as straggly shoots with a neon glow. Clothes that nobody wants to wear right now, but are completely HOLE FREE and thus too good to throw out. Call them rags if you must, but they have glad rags potential. Do not approach the Heap with an older female relative in tow. You will not leave empty handed. Every woman needs at least one power jacket. And that blouse has a stain on the back, but it would be perfect under your good jacket. It’s slimming.
The Heap grew in a very specific context, one that people in midlife, like me, can now look back on with nostalgia. In Poland in the early nineties, so much was possible. And so many clothes were available, by the kilo! Decades later, a woman who was a girl back then writes letters to her daughter. You won’t listen, she says. I know you won’t, because I didn’t listen to my mother, either. But now I’m her, and one day, you will be me. You cannot escape your fate. Nor can you escape that rose-pink hoodie that’s completely HOLE FREE. You think it’s finally made it into the boot of the car headed for the Red Cross, but you’re wrong. Mum’s having one last rootle through before she closes the lid…
If you have a host of mothers (aunts included), or even just one family member who cannot pass a crate marked SALE. If you have ever held on to something you might wear, if your body were a completely different shape, which it will never be. If you have ever found your relatives exasperating, only to realise how exasperating you can be yourself. This book is for you!
I hope Karolina Lewestam’s Szmaty gets translated soon.
Translator, editor, writer, reader
found in translation 
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