Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

by Anna Quindlen

One day, doing laundry, it occurred to me that the continuum in which I found myself included the demise of women’s underwear. I had stacks of my own bikini pants on top of the dryer, and I was comparing them in my mind to my mother’s remembered granny panties and my daughter’s own barely-there lace thongs. If you laid that lingerie in a line, it not only gave you a road map of the differences in sexual mores and openness through the years, it also suggested that the next generation of young women, my granddaughters, would wind up going commando.