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March 21, 2025
from “How to Leave a Room”
by Marcia Aldrich
in The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction
“She recalls, after her mother died, finding the familiar tube of lipstick while going through her mother’s things, and feeling ‘overcome with a desire’ to smear her lips.”
—THE
To celebrate our first decade, The Humble Essayist is reprising once a month features from each of the past ten years. This week we reprint the 2021 feature on “How to Leave a Room” by Marcia Aldrich. She is the author of Girl Rearing, Companion to an Untold Story, and Studio of the Voice.
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The essay “How to Leave a Room” is from Studio of the Voice. It begins with Aldrich noting her mother’s belief that when you leave a room you should “leave no trace behind.”
The Paragraph of the Week
And yet, to my confusion, she wore lipstick, applied in a thick style that changed little from year to year, a signature of sorts. In the bathroom she had her own sink, mirror, and cabinet. Out of the top drawer of the vanity she’d pull her single tube of lipstick—Revlon’s Mercy, a buoyant shade of red, a bit shrill. Leaning in close to the mirror, she puckered her lips and applied her Mercy, careful to stay inside the lines. At the end of the application, she’d brusquely rip a tissue from a nearby box and blot. And there would be the telltale red imprint of a kiss.
—Marcia Aldrich
Commentary
Marcia Aldrich’s mother taught her daughter to “leave no trace behind” when you “leave a room” and yet when she wore lipstick she would blot her lips with a tissue “leaving the telltale red imprint of a kiss.” As an adult, Marcia also wears lipstick favoring “Black Honey” exasperating her daughter’s circle of friends who prefer piercings. “Pierce, Don’t Paint” they say “with a lisp on studded tongues,” causing Marcia to wonder why she does paint her lips. It brings pleasure—her favorite “noir” color “throws people off”—but she knows that is not the full story. She recalls, after her mother died, finding the familiar tube of lipstick while going through her mother’s things, and feeling “overcome with a desire” to smear her lips. The lipstick she realized was the mark of a “twisted allegiance” to her mom. Discovering it in the room that her mother had left forever she imagines “finding a tissue” as well, “on which she had blotted her lips” and knows, if she happened upon such a kiss, “she would hold onto that tissue for eternity.”
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—THE
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Announcements
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
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PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
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Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
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See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
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See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
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The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
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The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
