My Mademoiselle Summer

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The Barbizon Hotel for Women, 140 East 63rd Street, in December 1980; Meg Wolitzer recalls the summer of 1979 when she and other Mademoiselle magazine guest editors stayed there.

As I lay drowsing in bed at the Barbizon Hotel for Women, the maid began slamming her fist against my door like a D.E.A. agent, and I popped up, briefly disoriented, taking in the grim, narrow room, the orange and yellow bedspread, the clothes I’d laid out on the armchair the night before. Slowly, I rose from my bed and took my shower caddy down the hall, nodding to a few of the other girls â€" or were we women now? I wasn’t sure.

Four Mademoiselle guest editors from 1963: from left, Kathy van Leeuwen, Susan Clapper, Lise Christensen and Cindi Buchanan.

It was the summer of 1979, and we were all winners of Mademoiselle magazine’s Guest Editor competition; the same college contest that Sylvia Plath had once won, and which I had often thought of as “The Bell Jar contest.” I had entered in part because I had a bit of a preoccupation with Plath. Not seriously, not like someone I had known at Smith who dressed in black and called herself Sivvy, Plath’s nickname.

I wasn’t depressive, and I wasn’t even a poet, but at age 20 it was easy to feel a connection. Plath had also been a student at Smith when she won the contest 26 years earlier, and while I hoped my time in New York City would be happier than hers had been, I also hoped there would be some overlap. After all, despite the uneasy, increasingly desperate mood-state described in “The Bell Jar,” the first part of the novel is set against a backdrop of big-city glamour. I imagined a group of young women in chic little outfits striding across marble office-building lobbies, and going out at night for drinks with Yale men, to whom they might lose their virginity.

Mademoiselle, which published its last issue in November 2001, was known for more than just fashion and advice. One cover, in February 1954, boasted only two, telling headlines: “Romantic fashions, for spring, for brides, for tall girls”; and “Dylan Thomas’s ‘Under Milk Wood.’ ”

The magazine published an astonishing array of literary work (mostly fiction) by writers including Truman Capote, Albert Camus, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers and James Baldwin, and later, Alice Munro and Barbara Kingsolver. Its list of college competition winners was stellar, too: not just Plath, but also Joan Didion, Mona Simpson, Ann Beattie, Francine du Plessix Gray and Diane Johnson.

To me, Mademoiselle was to Vogue what Skipper was to Barbie: her younger, crisply put-together sister who read Mary McCarthy and attended a Seven Sisters college instead of lolling around the Dream House all day.

The night we 14 winners arrived in New York, it was hard not to notice that the city lacked the smooth, high shellac I associated with Plath’s era; instead, it partly resembled an episode of “Kojak.” We traveled in a pack to the premiere of the movie “Players,” starring Dean Paul Martin and the Mademoiselle contest alumna Ali MacGraw. The fact that I could immediately tell that no one would remember this movie had ever existed might have been a warning. But I partied as if it were 1953, wanting things to stay the same, even as I was antsy for them to change.

Mademoiselle seemed to feel similarly, wanting to be current and to compete, yet clinging to the wholesome collegiate sensibility that we, the guest editors, were meant to embody. In our summer at the Barbizon, I felt enclosed in the amber of the long-ago (not entirely an unpleasurable sensation) while craning to see what lay ahead.

There were still echoes of the world Elizabeth Winder described in her recent book “Pain, Parties, Work,” about Plath’s experience in the city. So much time has passed now that some details are murky, but I do clearly remember us with our slightly damp, fragrant hair (my shampoo of choice was “Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific”) and summer blouses, walking or taking the No. 6 train to the Condé Nast building, then on Madison Avenue.

Fairly soon, friendships were formed. I hung around with Nancy Davis, a student at Rhode Island School of Design with a chic and androgynous visual-artist style, who had entered the contest on a dare, and Jesse Green, who had a thick beard and a general air of amused detachment. (In a transparent bid for modernity, the contest had gone coed earlier in the ’70s, and there were three men among us.)

Meg Wolitzer’s most recent novel, “The Interestings,” was published in April.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 21, 2013, on page ST1 of the National edition with the headline: My Mademoiselle Summer.