Diamonds: A Girl’s Best Path to Selflessness?

By Janet Maslin writing in the New York Times.
Published: September 5, 2008

THE NECKLACE
Thirteen Women and the Experiment That Transformed Their Lives
By Cheryl Jarvis

Ballantine Books. US$24.

One day at a mall in Ventura, Calif., a real estate agent named Jonell McLain had a retail epiphany. She had just sold a house and wanted to buy her clients a box of candy. Honestly that was all. That was the only reason she was out shopping.

But as Ms. McLain passed a jewelry store something stopped her in her tracks. It was a diamond necklace. “It was, she thought, simply exquisite — and exquisitely simple.” It was morally indefensible and outrageously expensive. And yet. And yet.

“Over the next three weeks Jonell was surprised how often she thought about the diamond necklace,” Cheryl Jarvis writes in “The Necklace,” an inspirational-bling book that means to position itself somewhere between “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” Jonell McLain’s innocence turned inspirational when she realized she could buy the necklace for entirely unselfish and uplifting reasons.

What if a group of women were to split the purchase price, own the necklace together and set up a system for sharing it? What if they used their collective energy to help others, learn important life lessons and repudiate materialism? What if they “rewrote the narrative of desire”? It was this kind of thinking that would eventually lead Ms. McLain to want to write a column called “The Champagne Socialist” for a Ventura magazine.

To read the rest of this fascinating tale go to the NYT online.

FOOTNOTE

This is a Harper Collins publication in the UK/Commonwealth and HC NZ advise they will be releasing it here later in the year.