coat tales; At age seventeen, Jean Hanff Korelitz fell in love with an unassumingly elegant Perry Ellis brown coat that hinted at the sophisticated woman she hoped to-and would-become.

Byline: Jean Hanff Korelitz

When I was a senior in high school in 1978, I sold my first magazine story and took my entire earnings straight to Bloomingdale's. I had a very particular indulgence in mind. I wanted a coat like the ones I'd seen in Vogue, soft and dark and oversize and belted like great big bathrobes, a far cry from the grubby jean jackets and ski parkas that filled the hallways at my school. The coats-and in particular one brown coat by Perry Ellis-seemed to promise a kind of luxurious informality. I coveted that coat, even though I wasn't sure I was ready to wear it. At seventeen, I had little of the confidence of the women in the photographs, and none of the casual, thoughtless elegance. Still, I wanted it. I wanted it, I think, not for the person I was then, but for the person I was hoping to turn into someday.

I spent a long time looking at the Perry Ellis coat on Bloomingdale's very adult third floor, which was so different from the earsplitting teen-saturated atmosphere one flight down, where I usually shopped. I touched the soft brown fabric and imagined wrapping myself up in it but was not actually brave enough to try it on. The $250 fee I'd been paid for my article in Seventeen magazine wasn't nearly enough. To assuage my disappointment, I rationalized that the coat would look awfully out of place in rural New Hampshire, where I was about to attend college. I sadly left it behind.

On my snowy brick-and-clapboard campus, students moved about in puffy down jackets, Fair Isle sweaters, pants, and turtlenecks with absurd decorations, like whales and hearts. I had been right about that coat, I would sometimes think, imagining the long brown hem trailing in the spring mud. I acquired a down jacket of my own and it served me well for four years, but it, in turn, failed to make my next transition, to Cambridge University in England.

Sylvia Plath famously arrived at Cambridge in 1955 with a matching set of white Samsonite luggage. I turned up almost exactly 30 years later with two overburdened suitcases and no coat (it was summer). Like Plath, I soon found myself thoroughly distracted by love. I fell hard for a man whose lectures I attended: self-consciously Byronic, utterly persuasive. I was so in love that when my parents came to visit, I virtually floated down to London to meet them at their hotel. It was autumn by then, and I still had no coat, so we walked through Belgravia to Harrods in search of one.

Deep in the racks of trench coats and gabardine, we found a long brown coat made of Irish tweed. It reminded me instantly of the lost Perry Ellis coat, but was rougher and flecked with many colors in the weave. When I put it on, I loved the way it hung. I felt beautiful. I felt adult, as if I were really growing into that confident, elegant person I'd conjured years earlier in Bloomingdale's. My parents bought the coat for me, and I wore it back to Cambridge, where the days were indeed getting colder.

Not long after, the man I was in love with ended our affair. All of a sudden, Cambridge was a miserable place, a freezing place. When I stayed in, I huddled close to my electric fire, trying to distract myself from my misery. When I rode my bicycle to lectures I had to stop frequently to pick the long hem of my brown tweed coat from the gears. Sometime that winter, my mother sent me a clipping about ...