Away

We all know how Jane Austen wrote her books in the parlor, that most public of spaces. When she heard someone approach, she slipped her pages unobtrusively beneath the blotter. J. K. Rowling famously wrote her first book at a café, ignoring the loud chatter, the jostled table, the spilled coffee, the constant draughts from the door. Those stories are not mine. I can’t write that way.

When I quit my day job to write, decades ago, I lived in New York City with my husband and daughter. I wrote in the guest room. I didn’t quite take it over—it still had a bed, and I moved out when we had guests. But it had a desk, and during the day I shut the door and sat at that desk. There was no view—my desk faced the wall, and the window looked out on a sort of air shaft. It was perfect. I felt sequestered.

Photographs by Doug Bruns

The next year we moved into an old farmhouse in New York State. I wrote in a small room under the eaves on the third floor, up a narrow flight of stairs. This was also a sort of guest room, with a bed. Beside me were windows looking out toward the barn, but my desk faced the eaves. No one came up to the third floor, and I had no phone. This was before the internet. I was sequestered and solitary. I couldn’t hear people downstairs, I couldn’t hear footsteps or conversation.

I sat down to write first thing in the morning, and I wrote until sometime in the afternoon. My daughter was at school, and my husband was at work. Since I wrote while the house was empty, you’d think I could have worked in the dining room, which faced the road and the driveway. It was a big pleasant room with a long sturdy table. But I couldn’t work there, in the front of the house, right next to the kitchen. It was too public.

War veterans experience something called hypervigilance, a mental state of continual alertness for danger. I have a minor version of this, a writer’s version. For me, danger lies in the sound of a footstep, a spoken word. Anyone could destroy the fragile construction I have to make each day.

Writing is a bit like inflating a vast oxygen tent contained by a thin filmy membrane. Each time I write I have to breathe life into this, slowly blowing it larger and larger, making it more and more substantial, giving it shape. The sound of anyone’s voice, an approaching step, arrests me. I waver, and the whole filmy construct trembles, shudders, and then deflates, sliding into nothingness. It’s gone.

I wrote in the guest room on the third floor until my husband, for my birthday, gave me a copy of A Room of One’s Own and offered to redo the top of the garage for my study. It would be my own space, separate from the house, and up a flight of stairs. It was away. For twenty years I wrote in that study. I wrote Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, A Glimpse of Scarlet, Asking for Love, This is My Daughter, Sweetwater, and A Perfect Stranger. Finally in 2005 we sold the farmhouse.

Being really away, of course, is the best. At MacDowell, the artists’ colony, especially in the winter, my sense of awayness was absolute. I worked on Sweetwater there, and Cost. The studios had no phones and no internet. No one came to visit without permission. No footsteps, no approach, except when someone arrived, once a day, with lunch.

Of course I can’t live in an artists’ colony, so instead I go as far away as I can. I’m back in New York City now, during the week. I have my own study, with a phone and a printer and the internet. When I write I leave all this. I go down the hall to the maid’s room behind the...