“I was a fixture, a force, and a fierce advocate of fashion and style,” Talley writes in the memoir’s introduction. He also acknowledges how, for most of his career, he was the only person of color in “the upper echelons of fashion journalism.”

To celebrate having passed the boards for foreign medical graduates, my father bought a new Chevy Caprice station wagon, turtle green with matching interior. The flatbed in the back folded into a bench seat that faced the rear.