The Underrated Pleasure of Wearing Jewelry Made Just for You

I am not embarrassed to say that one of the great benefits to publishing a book is jewelry. When my first novel, "The People in the Trees," came out in 2013, I bought just one thing with my advance: a deep-blue enamel ring that I had lettered with the first line - Kaulana na pua a o Hawaii/Famous are the flowers of Hawaii - of one of the most resonant Hawaiian protest songs, "Famous Are the Flowers," written in 1893 to voice support for the overthrown Queen Liliuokalani, the islands' last monarch. My book was an allegory of Pacific colonialism, and it seemed right that I should wear this reminder of Hawaii, what it had been and what it had lost, on my hand.When my second novel, "A Little Life," was published last March, I didn't buy any jewelry. But people gave it to me anyway: a reader sent me a silver cuff. A group of my close friends got together and bought me a ring - a heavy gold bird with round, brilliant-cut diamonds for eyes and dangling a briolette-shaped ruby from its mouth like a drop of blood - from the renowned Jaipur-based jeweler Gem Palace. (This very creation had actually inspired a similar piece of jewelry that appears in the book's final chapter.)But even so, I wanted a piece of custom jewelry, something to commemorate the novel's characters, who had become as vivid and complicated to me as my own friends: certainly it felt as if I had spent more time with them in the year and a half it had taken to write the book than I had spent with actual humans. And then my friend Claudia, a jewelry editor, told me about a label called Foundrae.Foundrae was begun and is designed by Beth Bugdaycay, the former CEO of Rebecca Taylor, and consists of women's ready-to-wear - silky, slouchy jumpsuits; micro-pleated, shell-pink chiffon skirts; knitwear stippled with holes and slashes - and a fine jewelry line. Co-designed with Leeora Catalan, the jewelry designs include triangle-shaped earcuffs and medallion-shaped charms, but the most distinctive pieces are enamelwork on 18k gold. Pleasingly hefty, they come in four colorways meant to represent a different quality or endowment one needs to find one's way through life: Strength (red), Karma (blue), Dream (black) and Protection (green). The label's own pieces are gorgeous - they have a graphic, talismanic quality that makes them appear at once assuringly ancient and attractively modern - but Bugdaycay and Catalan also do custom work, and really, jewelry is at its best when it's made for only you. When we wear a piece of custom jewelry, we are adding ourselves to a legacy as old as the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians - older. Very few traditions can be said to have remained unchanged over the history of time, but the act of announcing oneself to the world through jewelry is something that has endured through millennia and across cultures. We may no longer formally declare our tribal affiliations under flags or with particular hairstyles or colors, but we still do with what we choose to display on our fingers, our ears and around our necks and wrists.Bugdaycay and Catalan talk a lot about the ineffable qualities of their jewelry, and I was at first skeptical, even though they are both so radiant and kind that feeling any doubt seemed churlish, somehow. But then I went to visit them. Foundrae's New York City offices and showroom are on Lispenard Street, an obscure, narrow corridor south of Canal Street, just on the edge of TriBeCa, that happens to be the place my characters live: I had never before met anyone who knew of the street's existence, much less anyone who actually lived on it. It seemed like an omen. I went up to Bugdaycay's apartment - she lives above the store, just as a 19th-century shopkeeper would have - and she and Catalan let me fit different bangles around my wrists, let me try to cram their beautiful rings onto my fingers, let me tangle up their fine gold necklaces. They waited as I made my decisions, and then waited again as I remade them.And then, two or so months after that, a visit: a copy of my book, its pages glued together into a solid brick, wrapped in red ribbon and hand-delivered to my office by Catalan (Bugdaycay was out of town). "Open it," she said, smiling, and I did. There, in a square coffin Bugdaycay had carved out of the book's innards, were two pendants, one with the names of the two central characters, another with "Lispenard"; and a ring, with all four of the main characters' names, the space between them punctuated with tiny diamonds. I put everything on at once, of course: the gold felt warm against my skin; I could feel the weight of the ring on my finger. They weren't there to protect me, necessarily, nor offer me strength - but they reminded me, and remind me now, of something I'd made, something that will always be mine. What better to announce to the world than that?