When I read the title, my first thought was of the French herbal liquor made by Carthusian monks since 1737. But no, this story is about a woman who is obsessed with a dress she saw in a boutique in New York. This is 'The Chartreuse' by Mona Awad, published in The New Yorker on July 20, 2025.
The narrator scoured online sites and all places for this dress. She bought it in varying colors and lengths. Then there's new hue she became fanatical over — chartreuse. The lines totally described her obsession and placing items in the cart, and her thought process before carting out.
Heck, that's all of us. We might not be doing that with a dress, but we'd be doing the same with different things or many other clothes. The hesitation and then finally checking out the items. In an interview with the magazine, the author explained her attention to the lines describing the narrator's thought processes and to the point she hits 'buy', every time.
The story describes the moment after she’s found a new hue—chartreuse—and has decided to buy the piece: “One finger, a few clicks, that was all she had to do. Add to cart. Checkout. Then Google would know her, the machine would let her. . . . Always a hesitation with the credit-card click, that was part of it. The held breath, the raised finger, the uncertainty, a sense of underlying stakes.” How important was it to describe that hesitation and then the point at which she acts?
Oh, it’s essential. This is a story that explores addiction and I wanted to capture that headspace as viscerally as possible. Her hesitation gives the reader a sense of what’s at stake and a sense, too, that she is somewhat aware of those stakes. She knows she shouldn’t do this. But knowing something and doing it are of course two different countries. One can know and know and know. One can be very reasonable. But reason alone can’t save you in the end. Not when you’re in the grip of addiction, as she is. There’s a horror in that that I wanted to activate early on, so that the story quickly begins operating in a place outside of reason. And, surely, we’ve all been there.
The narrator used to be a professor of sorts at a university. Then somehow she quite and came here to live alone in La Jolla in San Diego. It's a ritzy community, but her apartment is shabby, and the area is known as 'the drug den'. Her close kin of a mother and an uncle have died. She knew no one beyond interacting with FedEx courier crew. She has many voices in her head and seems to talk to herself more than to other humans. She longs to fit in her community, and being neither blonde nor skinny, wants societal acceptance as well. All these manifest in the form of the dress obsession and with buying them.
We don't know the narrator's struggles, but she must have her difficulties. She seems to have a hangup about her mother, how cruel the mother has been to her about how she looked in clothes and such. The author uses a lot of italics in this story, to emphasize on how much she talks aloud to herself. But that's no more than any average person, really.
Later, when she’d found the chartreuse on Farfetch, she’d clicked. An unlikely color. A perfect cut. The model, a sullen blonde with messy pageboy hair, looked vaguely sick in it. Miserable. Almost tantalizingly so. “Chartreuse,” it said beneath the photo, and nothing else. Chartreuse, that was a drink, wasn’t it? Made by French monks. Carthusian. In the seventeenth century, something like that. Distilled from herbs and flowers. She had a flash, maybe even a memory, of her mother enjoying a glass. A difficult color to pull off, of course, that glowing yellow-green. It didn’t suit everyone. It didn’t suit the pale blond model.
Probably it won’t suit me, either, she thought, staring, though she herself wasn’t blond or pale.
The narrator missed a FedEx delivery of said chartreuse dress, came home to find a door tag about the missed delivery, and went to ask the deliveryman about it. She was told that there were two FedEx delivery companies, and this one that she asked, didn't have her package. Then apparently she missed a second delivery attempt. She lives at Number Thirteen. Her neighbor at Twelve told her that the deliveryman didn't even come up.
She finally caught the deliveryman the next door, who insisted that he knocked but no one came to the door. Well, who knows whether he did. He assumed no one lived in that run-down Thirteen. She wore that dress and a million thoughts ran through her head. Anyway, the package got delivered and she stalked the deliveryman. She finally had this chartreuse dress in her hands.
It felt like this was the dress that she had been waiting for all her life. I don't know, there was a finality to receiving this package and having it with her. She somehow told the FedEx admin that she needed this package because there was a party on the cliff that she needed to get out to, a party held in her honor to celebrate her promotion. What party!? What promotion!?
She put on the dress. But one single thought kept biting at her — "What happens after?"
“I have no idea,” she said at last through dry lips to her own reflection. “I have no fucking clue.” But she was literally filling with knowledge now. “How is it that I’m looking into a mirror and I feel as if I can’t even see myself anymore?” She asked this even as the answer came to her. You don’t need to see yourself anymore.
When we read between the lines, we figured that she had sort of a mental breakdown, or plagued by childhood pain that she couldn't get rid and it came roaring back when her mother died. She used to live in New York, and just couldn't bear the stress anymore. She quit her job and came to live San Diego. But her demons followed her. And they manifested into that obsession about buying the ideal dress that would fit her and hunting it online.
When she finally hunted the ideal dress down in the color that she wanted, it felt like she was done. The ending was almost expected, but still a tad shocking when it came. It does leave it to the readers' assumptions. So I made mine.
Her mother would be there. You pay the price, don’t you? she’d say. You pay the price on top of the price. Her uncle, surely, his hands open now for there was nothing to resist anymore. The deliverymen with their dollies and boxes, ready with their tags. All of them smiling. She could see them raising their glasses, the last light sparking from the liquor. Distilled from herbs and flowers, a golden-green shimmer on the horizon. A flash of light sinking into dark water. They were all there, waiting to celebrate her. Maybe her friend, too, was at the bar waiting. She could almost see her, couldn’t she? The shape of her, waving. The hotel danced up ahead, as if it were floating. The ocean crashed by her side, the darkest door. She’d be there very soon.
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