On the earthly pleasures of someone's else's stuff

There’s something shocking, but also quite inspiring, about seeing a person’s entire life reduced to a weekend sale

At an estate sale you can buy almost anything of someone else’s stuff. But is it stuff that makes a home, or memories? I’ve been thinking long and hard on this.

My new book, The Giant on the Skyline: On Home, Belonging and Learning to Let Go, will be published on 6th May and I would love you to read it. Home drenches every page. Home is a concept which has obsessed me since I was a child, and examining what it feels like to want it, make it, miss it and leave it inspired so much of what I wrote.

Last week I broke I mug I really like. It was blue with a gold band around the rim, one of the mugs I’d wrapped in a t-shirt and packed into a suitcase I carried with me when we moved from England to Washington DC last summer. I was annoyed with myself when I broke that mug, because I was in a rush, excited after packing to leave for spring break in California; I’d balanced the mug on East of Eden by John Steinbeck and Where I Was From Joan Didion, two classic west Coast texts I’ve taken on holiday. The mug toppled from the books I carried in one hand, my lap top in the other, smashing on the wooden floor of the landing. We were late for the flight, so it’s still there, a mosaic of pieces I’ll clear up when we get home to Washington DC.

Breaking that mug made me think more closely of what it is that makes a home. I’d minded about it enough to cart it all the way from Oxfordshire to America, but the last seven months has made me think even more closely about what it is that makes a home. Home, and what it signifies, is something that’s obsessed me since I was small. When Pete first suggested we move to America, the panic, and anticipatory homesickness I felt at the idea of leaving the house and landscape I loved, and had deeply invested my life in, was so great that I spent a long period of time thinking, then writing about it. Writing is the way I process all my feelings, and my feelings about home became my newest memoir, The Giant On The Skyline. And now, furnishing and  creating a new home in America, in a completely alien city, where I knew no-one and had no roots, no friends, no memories or emotional connections, has taught me another profoundly important lesson about what it is I want in my life, and where I find comfort.