Video of my office (with oh god, so many sparkles) here
I think I dreamed of this room a long, long time ago.
Before we begin, here’s a reader question that I receive on the regular: What is making all those little rainbows in your office?!
Answer: A combination of $5 disco balls from Five Below, various crystals I’ve found at thrift stores and whatnot over the years, and – importantly – this absolute home essential. Buy one. You will love it.
I don’t really have a spot on the planet I’d call “home.” For most of my life it was NYC, but since my parents left, too…it’s different. I’ll always know the city in my bones, but it’s a fact: California is where (most of) the people I love are. There are so many of them, spread out through the state, and I wonder whether there’s something about it that drew us all here, like a homing beacon.
I assume that to my kids California will always feel like where they belong – a fact that is deeply alienating to the New Yorker in me. (Is it even an adolescence if you haven’t ridden the M11 bus uptown to try to buy wine coolers at Andy’s Deli? Or spent long Saturdays at the Salvation Army on 46th Street hunting for a perfectly weird ballgown to wear to class on Monday? Or had a first date at the Grey’s Papa on the Upper West Side? Serious question.)
So sure, California is their home state, but in terms of a physical house? I don’t know that there’s any one spot that they’ll think of when they’re older as their landing pad. Their home base, so to speak. We move. A lot. It’s just the way our life has gone (a.k.a. how I’ve made it go, both intentionally and not).
In 11th grade women’s lit, our teacher told us – only girls had enrolled in the class – to close our eyes, and imagine we had a room, just one room of our very own. What would it look like?
I do think that my style has stayed almost bizarrely consistent over the years, so to me our home is more of a feel than it is the walls themselves. Each time we’ve moved, for example, my favorite spot to set up has been some version or another of this room. I always do it first.
Years pass, everything changes, but everywhere I go, this room comes along. When I write, it’s where I envision my characters reclining after a long day. When I travel, it shows up in my dreams. Windchimes and pillows and rainbows on my toes: wherever I find them, it turns out, that’s home to me.
