Feeling at home

Making sense of the places we live (and love)

It’s an invitation: Make yourself at home. But what does it mean to feel “at home”? It’s something I’ve clearly been wondering about without necessarily realizing I’ve been wondering about it.

I was curious, as I waited three months to move into The Cottage, why I didn’t feel more excited. Especially as the time got closer. Especially as I carried my actual belongings into the actual cottage. Turns out I felt more excited about it on paper, about its potential, and about what it symbolized than I actually ever felt about it in reality. I realized, in the brief time I was there, it just never felt like mine. I never felt at home there. It was furnished, which made my life easier in the short term, but when the awkward oval dining room table and odd couch and giant bed aren’t yours it’s not going to feel like a place that’s yours. It was also isolated, which I thought was exactly what I wanted — away from people! on an island populated by dogs! has been my joke for years. But it turned out it wasn’t what I needed.

I feel at home in our family home when I’m there, but more and more it also feels like a place where a previous version of me lived. Which is true, of course. It is a bridge place now, to varying degrees, for all of us. It is the place where two adults are transitioning out of a marriage and an entwined friendship to be out on our own. It is a place where two teenagers will soon leave to embark on their adult lives. Sometimes I have to remind myself that other families don’t just disband when the kids graduate. It’s as if we’re a specialized team that came together to work on a project, and now that project is nearing completion.

Still, our family home is an environment I helped create, so I feel at home there. But perhaps in the way kids begin to separate from their parents as they get older, in order to ease the transition into being independent, I have begun to let go of my attachment to the physical aspects of our home. It’s the only space I was ever able to design and see come to life. It took me a lifetime to have that experience, so it was initially emotional and completely tantrum-level gross to think about letting it go. To think of someone buying our house and painting over the floors or stripping the wallpaper. But nothing is permanent. Nothing about life is ever permanent.

As I mentioned in my last (full) newsletter, thanks to a subscriber I found a new place (thank you again, Sarah!) where I live part-time. It’s a place and a space I have completely fallen in love with, that I feel at home in, so much so that I felt like I might genuinely cry as it started to come together. I’ve hardly had any time to settle into it, though. It came about so suddenly — I found out about it, did a 10-minute walkthrough, applied, signed the lease, threw my money down, then scrambled to find movers — all in a matter of days.

I didn’t have furniture, I needed silverware, I didn’t have a single pot to my name. Somehow this was fun to me. Maybe most people don’t feel this way as they set up their own place in their fifties, but to me it was thrilling (if exhausting). I was going to buy the same set of pots and pans that my ex bought, that are in our family home, because I trust his opinion on these matters. But he is a serious cook and I am … very much not. So I bought a smaller set that came in navy blue and thought I could never buy this if we were still together. Not because he would forbid it, but simply because he wouldn’t have liked them. Too design-y. Not enough pieces. And he’s the cook so he would’ve won. Now there is no winning or losing, just choosing and being done.

The only thing my ex has ever wanted in any home we’ve shared is a recliner. An old school, comfy-as-hell, La-Z-Boy recliner. And I was like absolutely fucking not. I joke with him now that when he finally gets his own place it will probably just be wall-to-wall recliners. Like maybe guests will have to walk from one to the other, the floor hot lava. And you know what? That’s how it should be! He deserves it! We all deserve to feel at home in our homes. And sometimes we don’t really realize how much we’ve compromised (even when those compromises weren’t a big deal, even when they invited no arguments at all) until we don’t have to compromise at all anymore, with anyone.

The first day that my apartment was completely pulled together — everything put away, cut flowers in vases, food in the fridge (finally) — was the same day that one* of the men I’ve been seeing came to stay with me for a few days. The last five months have been a patchwork of trying to conduct a private life with no permanent private space. This is a new life, a complicated life to be sure, but a good life that feels fulfilling, thrilling, and mine.

After he left, I returned to my family’s home for a couple of days, then left to go to Massachusetts for my high school reunion, then left again to head to Maine to work and write. So although I haven’t had the time to fully settle in, I do know from just those few days that I was able to look around those rooms and the spaces I had created, and feel completely at home. Even with his shoes or his papers on the floor and his empty tea cups on the coffee table. Because I knew those shoes and those papers wouldn’t be staying, the empty tea cups would go in the dishwasher. The apartment would go back to being mine. It was incredible to have him there, to remember what it’s like to share my own space with someone I’m wildly attracted to. To be in the moment, because there will be no getting married and there will be no raising children together. And it felt just as incredible to have that space back, all to myself.

It feels like mine in the slightly tattered (“perfect for upcycling!”) tablecloth that I grabbed off of eBay for 18 bucks and covered with candles and it didn’t matter if we dripped balsamic vinegar or tomatoes or coffee on it. It was in all the Craigslist scores and a few splurges that felt exactly how I wanted them to feel. It’s brand new neon orange bath towels because I saw them and was like !!! fuck yeah neon orange bath towels !!! And splurge-y soaps and splurge-y slippers and more storage solutions from Target than you can shake a giant red shopping cart at.

What makes you feel at home? Some details that I adore are the same details I’ve loved since I was looking for my first apartments. Big windows. Hardwood floors. “Character” which of course is like determining obscenity — you’ll know it when you see it. The building I’m living in was built in 1820 so there’s character to spare (and certainly nothing that is plumb nor level). Flowers make me feel at home, as does a cup of coffee. Magazines, the newspaper, even if it takes me forever to read them. Books. Blankets. My dog, Edie. The portraits of my kids by Lisa Luck and Winky Lewis. Perhaps what makes me feel most at home is to feel like I’m in a neighborhood that feels like me again, which hasn’t been the case since I had kids, maybe even since we lived in Portland. Twenty years is a long time to feel like you don’t fit in in the neighborhoods where you’ve lived. Twenty years is a long time to put what you want aside.

The couple of days I had Edie with me at the apartment we went for a few quick walks and the voiceover in my head was hello, neighborhood church, hello coffee shop, hello place where I just bought those neon orange towels and cheerful slippers. Hello this restaurant and that restaurant and I cannot wait to just walk around the corner and sit at your tables and be all “this is my life”, because this is my life, and then pay my check, get up, and walk back around the corner.

To home.

* Yes, one of them (openly, ethically). I’d like to highly recommend to anyone who’s been doing a fuck ton of monogamy for decades to celebrate not doing that anymore by literally. not. doing that. again. (or at least not immediately!)

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WRITING? UPDATES? FROM ME???
Believe it or not — and you can believe it! — I am finally back to focusing on that whole writing career thing I ignored for the past year. I’ll be appearing on The Official Dream Dinner Party Podcast (more soon) and I’m back to working on book reviews for The Washington Post. I won’t be pitching because I just don’t have the bandwidth for it but if you’re an editor with some thoughts on what this ding dong with a MacBook might be able to do for you, please reach out!

HAVE YOU TRIED TO REACH ME?
Hi. Awkward but: I ended my working relationship with my agent last November. What hadn’t occurred to me until recently is that if any of you book/editorial/publishing folk have reached out to me through my former agent (for blurbs, events, etc.) I haven’t received most of those messages, books, or requests. (Hey, it’s not like I was in any sort of shape to deal with any requests anyway! No bigs!) Anyway, you can reach me directly by responding to this email or by going through my website and using the contact form. And always, always remember my one rule:

THINGS FROM ELSEWHERE
• Loved this one from Rachel Syme in The New Yorker, especially as we head into cozy WHEN HARRY MET SALLY season: The Nora Ephron We Forget “Since her death, Ephron has become a symbol of sappy romance. But her real subject was how words could bring people together—or drive them apart.”
• Kathryn Jezer-Morton has transitioned her Substack over to a newsletter called Brooding on The Cut. It’s still her trademark analysis of modern family life, always with some killer/funny lines, and is just excellent, excellent, excellent. A few of my faves: Why Do Moms Love Fall So Much? and Sleepover Kits Are About Making Content, Not Playing Pretend and Taking a Break While Broke
• This story is the only thing that made me feel a lil 🥺️ about the Queen’s death. But this made me laugh and laugh about it and isn’t life (and maybe death?) all about balance!!?
• Scathing and good: Open Letter to the Drivers of Uptown Manhattan Who Honk as My Son Gets on His School Bus by Sandra Joy Stein on McSweeney’s
• Do any of you olds remember this issue of Esquire? I sure as hell do. I subscribed to Esquire and GQ back in the day because women’s magazines made me feel bad and when you think of all the hot women that are in men’s magazines that’s really saying something! Anyway, The Gossip Reading Club makes another newsletter appearance because, as always, it’s just so damn good: “Issue Twenty Four: Who the Hell is Allegra Coleman?”

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You can find my books here. You can find my writing here. You can find my copywriting and creative direction work here. You can find me on Twitter. You can find me on Instagram. Good luck finding me in real life, I mean, srsly.