I'm Gretchen Ribin and this is a little happier.

I love to read and there's one aspect of reading I particularly love.

It's when a writer describes an emotion or thought that I've had without quite realizing it,

and so makes my own experience more clear to me.

A writer gives me a new word or phrase to describe something so that I can describe the world

or human nature more accurately, or a writer describes an experience that I've had,

but assumed that no one else in the world had felt the same way.

In this way, reading someone else's reflections makes my own life richer.

For instance, I experienced this heightened clarity recently when I was reading I

M, the brilliant memoir by Isaac Mizrahi. Now, if you don't know much about Isaac Mizrahi,

there's a lot to learn. He's an American fashion designer, TV presenter, and chief designer

of the Isaac Mizrahi brand for Excel brands. He's based in New York City and he's best known

for his eponymous fashion lines. He serves as a judge for Project Runway All-Stars.

You may have seen his 1995 documentary Unzipped about the creation of one of his shows.

I was struck by many of the observations and incidents in the memoir, but one stood out in

particular because he describes something that I feel often and very strongly when I'm confronted by

some work of art, whether visual or written, that I truly love. I've tried before to describe my

version of this feeling to my daughter's Eliza and Eleanor, but I didn't put it into words as well

as he did. Here's what Mizrahi writes about seeing the movie Funny Girl in his childhood. He writes,

it's such a cliche, a kid sitting in a dark theater, the world opening up, a kind of shifting,

and yet that's truly the way it happened. That moment marked another first for me.

This flood of inspiration was accompanied by a feeling of dread and a hint of resigned exhaustion.

...