How to Decorate

Hi friends.

A few weeks ago in New York, I had lunch with a friend who had just separated from her partner and moved into a new apartment. They had been with each other for fifteen years, had started out young together. They had decorated their home, bought the furniture, had the conversations about how things should look and feel. Now she could do anything. Anything! But what did she want to do? What was her style in the end? What was her aesthetic all on her own?

She had been to my house before, and asked me how I had figured out what I liked. I told her when I had moved down to New Orleans, I had gone through a similar moment of starting over in a space that I didn’t quite know what to do with. I mean I knew I needed a desk and an office chair—but what else?

In New York I spent more than a decade in a loft that I had barely decorated. All my money went to rent, of course, and here and there I picked up free or cheap furniture. But mostly I let the loft, with its big windows and concrete floors and crumbling ceilings, be the decor. I had an industrial work desk and a long table and a small couch and some art on the walls but that was it. I let the light streaming in from the windows and the big buildings in the distance be my aesthetic. That truthfully felt like me.

And that was all I could afford and or had time to consider—I was too busy writing. But also in my efforts to submerge myself in my literary aesthetics I had ignored this part of me.

In New Orleans I had a whole house from scratch to decorate. I had saved up for it for so long, and it felt precious and important. So naturally I felt stressed. I was certain I would fuck it all up. What did I know anyway?

I told my friend in New York about a conversation I had when I first bought my house. I asked a friend here in New Orleans who had a beautiful home (and who founded a stylish hotel) what her advice was on decor. She told me to start with research. Her very first suggestion: To buy a bunch of home design magazines and look through them to see what I liked. (A few years later for this woman’s 40th birthday, I got her a subscription to The Paris Review because I remembered ah ha, she likes magazines.) She also told me to go to furniture stores and look around. To ask questions. To be thoughtful.

It immediately felt less urgent and stressful to think about things in that way. This was my chance to make something my own. This house was for no one else but me.

In New Orleans I knew I wanted more natural elements, for example. No more cold concrete. (I am not a shabby chic bitch but also I get why people like it.) I am not high-end or fancy. I seek comfort. I wanted wood and leather and linen. I bought a bookshelf made from cypress and also airy curtains. I have framed prints of swampy scenes, and paintings of ponds and lakes and things like that. It took years of thought and adjustment to get my house to look like a home. I only knew I wanted things to feel lighter and easier because that’s what I wanted from my life when I moved down there.

And it worked for a while, until the world came calling. Still, my home in the early mornings before I check the news is one of my happiest places to be. When I am drinking that first cup of coffee. When I am writing to you.

Eight years in and only recently did I hang some of the last pieces of art. (Please just picture me staring at the fucking wall for years thinking: What goes there?) I’m telling you all this now because only in retrospect can I see what happened. Sometimes things take time and thought and care and often it can feel like they’re not moving fast enough but actually you’re probably going as fast as you can.

It took me a year to figure out what I wanted this new book I’m working on now to even be. It could take another year or two to even have it readable from start to finish. It could take three years, it could take five. (Hopefully it will not take eight!) If you read and think and have conversations with people and do the research and sit down and write as much as you can something will happen, progress will be made. You will produce the words. You will hang the painting. If you try.

This morning in the early hours before I checked my phone, I started reminiscing about all the times I have started over in my life. All the places I have lived, for starters. Countless apartments. Friendships and relationships I have moved in and out of, for better or for worse. Careers I have started and ended. And the books I have written.

Each time we start a project it is a new beginning. A new potential to decorate. Maybe it is not your enemy, this work that lies before you. Maybe it is your opportunity to make a new home for yourself.

Sending you focus this week.

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on twitter and instagram.