Announcement: Next Sunday, April 27th, at 11 am, I will be at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books! I’m moderating a panel called “The Call is Coming from Inside the House: Novels about Writers” with Danzy Senna, Nnedi Okorafor, and Ashley Whitaker. It should be fun!
More info here. (The (free) tickets for the event will go on sale this Sunday.)
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Not long after we moved into our house in 2017, my friend Lydia came over and proclaimed that the home was sexy. I took it as a big compliment. I love that word, and I use it all the time to describe all sorts of things that please and engage me. And I agreed with her assessment. The main rooms are large and airy; they receive a lot of that famous seductive LA light. The floors are blonde wood. The living room window looks out on a canyon of trees and houses. At sunset, the mountains beyond blush pink.
Yep. Sexy.
In the years since we’ve moved in, however, our house has lost some of its sex appeal. Makes sense, what with three kids and two different dogs crashing into the space day in and day out, not to mention the COVID lockdown, when we were here all the time and our home was expected to fulfill every social and practical need. It shows.
We’ve put in a lot of money fixing stuff you can’t see. It seems like nearly every pipe has been replaced. We totally rehabbed the septic system. There’s a new furnace and electric panel. A leak beneath one of the showers warped the floor ad we had to handle that. We also bought a new A/C unit after ours broke…on an 108 degree day. Oh, and we spent thousands of dollars evicting the rats in the attic that had chewed through the insulation.
This is all, in a word, unsexy.
None of these repairs were cosmetic, which means that everything wrong with the house that you can see remains unfixed. Our kitchen cabinets are either wretched or falling off. Or they’ve already fallen off—one is literally propped against a living room wall as I write this. The heating vents are dented, the floors scratched. The rugs are ripped and stained. Every wall is scuffed or chipping.
I feel such shame about my home’s disrepair.