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Other People's Clothes
Cover of Other People's Clothes
Other People's Clothes
A Novel
Borrow Borrow
Two American ex-pats obsessed with the Amanda Knox trial find themselves at the nexus of murder and celebrity in glittering late-aughts Berlin in this “hugely entertaining” (The New York Times) debut with a wicked sense of humor.
 
“Darkly funny, psychologically rich and utterly addictive... [a] harrowing tale of twisty female friendships, slippery identity and furtive secrets.” —Megan Abbott, best-selling author of The Turnout
Hoping to escape the pain of the recent murder of her best friend, art student Zoe Beech finds herself studying abroad in the bohemian capital of Europe—Berlin. Rudderless, Zoe relies on the arrangements of fellow exchange student Hailey Mader, who idolizes Warhol and Britney Spears and wants nothing more than to be an art star. 
 
When Hailey stumbles on a posting for a high-ceilinged, prewar sublet by well-known thriller writer Beatrice Becks, the girls snap it up. They soon spend their nights twisting through Berlin’s club scene and their days hungover. But are they being watched? Convinced that Beatrice intends to use their lives as inspiration for her next novel, Hailey vows to craft main-character-worthy personas. They begin hosting a decadent weekly nightclub in the apartment, finally gaining the notoriety they’ve been craving. Everyone wants an invitation to “Beatrice’s.” As the year unravels and events spiral out of control, they begin to wonder whose story they are living—and how it will end.
 
Other People’s Clothes brilliantly illuminates the sometimes dangerous intensity of female friendships, as well as offering an unforgettable window into millennial life and the lengths people will go to in order to eradicate emotional pain.
Two American ex-pats obsessed with the Amanda Knox trial find themselves at the nexus of murder and celebrity in glittering late-aughts Berlin in this “hugely entertaining” (The New York Times) debut with a wicked sense of humor.
 
“Darkly funny, psychologically rich and utterly addictive... [a] harrowing tale of twisty female friendships, slippery identity and furtive secrets.” —Megan Abbott, best-selling author of The Turnout
Hoping to escape the pain of the recent murder of her best friend, art student Zoe Beech finds herself studying abroad in the bohemian capital of Europe—Berlin. Rudderless, Zoe relies on the arrangements of fellow exchange student Hailey Mader, who idolizes Warhol and Britney Spears and wants nothing more than to be an art star. 
 
When Hailey stumbles on a posting for a high-ceilinged, prewar sublet by well-known thriller writer Beatrice Becks, the girls snap it up. They soon spend their nights twisting through Berlin’s club scene and their days hungover. But are they being watched? Convinced that Beatrice intends to use their lives as inspiration for her next novel, Hailey vows to craft main-character-worthy personas. They begin hosting a decadent weekly nightclub in the apartment, finally gaining the notoriety they’ve been craving. Everyone wants an invitation to “Beatrice’s.” As the year unravels and events spiral out of control, they begin to wonder whose story they are living—and how it will end.
 
Other People’s Clothes brilliantly illuminates the sometimes dangerous intensity of female friendships, as well as offering an unforgettable window into millennial life and the lengths people will go to in order to eradicate emotional pain.
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  • From the cover 1

    “Start from the beginning,” she insisted and if I were allowed to smoke, I would have lit a cigarette. I was never good at telling stories and this one always felt like it belonged to someone else; I had been young and stupid. I had been idealistic. I was twenty. Maybe I could start from the first slide of art history class—a black diorite pillar. Hammurabi’s code: two hundred and eighty-two laws and sliding punishments for eighteenth-century-bc justice, some seemingly logical, an eye for an eye, a surgeon’s hand for a botched surgery, a builder’s life for a collapsed building, some more bizarre—the guilt of the adulterer judged by whether or not they sank when thrown in water—all etched out onto a seven-foot column. But there was nothing for me on the cold black stone. No law had been engraved to deliver due process for what happened to me last year. I had no idea whose hand to chop off.

    “Okay. Well, what about her first words? What did she say when you got here?”

    I sat silent, arms tightly folded, unable to understand Frau Klein’s persistent interest in the beginning.

    The Spa was only for women, all of whom were present for different disorders, and some diseases, most unknown to me. But everyone knew why I was there. I was famous, and the angular whispers of the nurses and patients followed me through the concrete building. However, I found comfort in their efforts to mask these remarks, knowing all too well that outside the Spa there was no reason to whisper. By the time Berlin’s summer was blazing, we—Hailey Mader and myself, Zoe Beech—were all anyone could talk about.

    Sprawling and old, the Spa was situated in a converted primary school somewhere in northern Brandenburg. Its hallways still smelled chalky like the inside of a brick, and most of the bedrooms, once classrooms, were shared by two or three girls. But I was alone, living in what I assumed had once been a very generous broom closet, with my own square window, blue-painted chair with matching desk, and a porcelain sink adorned with a halo of dark-brownish mold. I liked to imagine that the ring of mold was a well-run city of tiny spores, filled with good, nonviolent mold citizens, maybe even with mold artists and mold curators doing coke at tiny mold clubs.

    I spent most of my time in this sort of useless daydream, elbows pressed into the soft wood of the desk, staring out at the unbearably still farmland and then, lightning, an interruption to my doldrums: a body writhing in a lake of blood, flashes strobing, sound blaring, like a Rihanna music video, or a trailer for a horror film. And just as fast as it crested, I’d snap back to the barren field or mildewy sink or the constellation of moles on Frau Klein’s neck.

    Frau Klein loved the word par-a-noi-a, letting each syllable slip like a ping-pong ball out of her wet mouth. She was in her early forties but dressed for her sixties, with roadkill-brown hair and potato-sack skirts. We had at this point spent many hours together and I was certain she was living vicariously through me, filling the void of her own existence with my answers and traumas, extracting information she would eventually sell to the tabloids, or her own tell-all.

    “Zoe, how did sex make you feel?”

    “Did you ever fantasize about Hailey?”

    Her voice sounded scripted as if she were recording an audiocassette from a language class.

    “What drugs did you do?”

    “What pushed you to do them?”

    I watched in disinterested horror, as the saliva began to surface at the edges of her...
About the Author-
  • CALLA HENKEL is a writer, playwright, director, and artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her work with Max Pitegoff has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of Art, and she currently operates a bar, performance space and film studio called TV in Berlin. Other People’s Clothes is her debut novel.
Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    December 6, 2021
    Henkel’s engrossing debut stages a cat and mouse game between a novelist and two art students in which art bleeds (literally and profusely) into life and vice versa. In 2008, NYU art student Zoe travels to Berlin for a year abroad in search of European “dignity and reason” after her friend, Ivy, is murdered. She will find neither. Zoe’s Berlin roommate and classmate is Hailey, a conceptual artist obsessed with Law and Order SVU and Amanda Knox (that “sexed-up Joan of Arc”), and bent on achieving Warholian fame. They rent the apartment of bestselling pulp novelist Beatrice Becks. With Berlin’s “hedonistic wells still running deep,” Zoe and Hailey embrace the drug-fueled spectacle, meeting pretentious art world habitués, Habsburg descendants, and louche seducers who deliver lines like “I collect experiences and handblown glass, but my dad bought Richter early.” Soon Zoey and Hailey suspect Beatrice is reading their diaries and emails for plot material, and Hailey, petrified of them being “immortalized as losers,” conspires with Zoe to gin up drama. But as Beatrice’s interventions intensify and Hailey seeks to exploit Ivy’s tragic death for fame, Hailey and Zoe’s friendship and lives are jeopardized. The antics grow increasingly outlandish, but Henkel shines with her wry, well-observed portrait of the artist. In the end, this offers an intelligent dissection of the insatiable appetite for dead girl stories.

  • Library Journal

    August 1, 2022

    Henkel's captivating debut takes listeners on an unsettling ride through the twists and turns of two art students' rapidly disintegrating lives. While studying abroad in Berlin, Zoe, grieving the recent murder of her best friend, connects with impulsive, privileged Hailey. At first, Zoe and Hailey are hopelessly awkward outsiders in the vibrant Berlin party scene, but everything changes when they sublet an apartment from popular author Beatrice Becks and her mother. The new apartment becomes a glittering locus point for wild, drug-and-sex-filled parties, pulling both women into an increasingly disorienting lifestyle. Their once stable relationship shifts into tension and paranoia, where nothing is as it seems. Narrator Lauryn Allman's low, steady voice is a perfect foil for the book's spiraling events, to which she brings a balancing note of melancholy. Allman's characterizations are superb, capturing a range of emotions, from the women's heady party-planning excitement to the sharp darkness of their growing suspicion and distrust. Hailey is particularly well-voiced, conveying her neediness and infectious optimism. VERDICT Highly recommended for fans of twisty psychological suspense in the vein of Stephanie Wrobel's This Might Hurt or Tara Isabella Burton's Social Creature.--Sarah Hashimoto

    Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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A Novel
Calla Henkel
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