We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.

Zelda Fitzgerald wryly captures how early-20th-century American consumer culture trained a generation to build aspirations out of marketing claims. The “infinite promise” of advertising suggests not just persuasion but a quasi-religious faith in self-transformation through purchasable shortcuts—learning piano “by mail,” achieving beauty through “mud.” Her insistence that she “still believe[s]” is ironic: it reads as both a confession of lingering susceptibility and a critique of how deeply such messages lodge in the imagination. The quote also gestures toward the Jazz Age’s blend of optimism and gullibility, where desire, identity, and status could be packaged and sold.