What was the hardest part of your experiment?

Ending it. I’d spent a whole year outside the sucking black holes of consumer desire and make-myself-look-good ambition and I really did not want to go back in. And so I didn’t, at first. Only as I started to write about all the issues I’d raised—what good hair and sexiness really means to me, what clothes say to the world, what spending guilt and forbidden luxury are all about—did I admit certain grooming habits back into my life. For the record, I never skipped tooth-brushing, although I have been known to shower with a baby wipe under duress.