At the Desk
Katie da Cunha Lewin, The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love
Elliott & Thompson, 288pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781783969104
reviewed by Helena C. Aeberli
For the past few years I have been working at the exact same desk in my university library. Every morning I show up at 9am to claim my spot, glaring at any interlopers who so much as glance its way. I unpack my necessary detritus — notebook, KeepCup, grubby sticker-clad laptop — and settle down to work. The desk is university property, but to all intents and purposes, between 9 and 5 on the weekdays, it belongs to me. Friends know exactly where to find me if they need to borrow a charger or fish me out of my books for a coffee break. Other regulars keep an eye on my laptop while I go for lunch. When I returned last September after a year out of academia, a researcher at the table behind me started suddenly: ‘You’re back!’
What I have done with my library desk is to build myself a writer’s room when I lack one of my own. In The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love, Katie da Cunha Lewin explores the mythology of the writer’s room, questioning why we’re so obsessed with the living and working spaces of our favourite writers. From Joan Didion’s California studio to Virginia Woolf’s Sussex garden study, not to mention the fantasy desks we dream up for ourselves, the writer’s room exerts a particular power over our imaginations. We have a clear mental image of this archetypal room, even if we can’t quite picture the working writer within it — a calm, cosy, yet somewhat ramshackle space, with a busy desk and overflowing bookshelves, objets d’art and kitschy tchotchkes littered throughout as spurs to the creative process. This archetypal writing space, as da Cunha Lewin suggests, exists ‘outside of time, outside of the architecture of the house, freed from the everyday’.
The fantasy of the writer’s room is just that: a fantasy. Its enduring image is borrowed from canonical images and tropes preserved in films and artworks, as well as the curatorial efforts of the literary tourism industry, rather than the reality of the writer’s life. Today, a whole industry exists around its allure, encompassing both historic houses like Woolf’s Monk’s House and social media posts with tags like #darkacademia or #thoughtdaughter. Unsurprisingly, Woolf is da Cunha Lewin’s touchstone, but The Writer’s Room explores an impressive array of writers, including James Baldwin, Agatha Christie, Zadie Smith, Ernest Hemingway, Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, and Sally Rooney, as well as a host of famous houses, which da Cunha Lewin visits in person and via the virtual tours which many museums provided during the pandemic.
As anyone who has visited one knows, these literary houses are strange places, frozen in time to give the impression of a mind alive with creative genius. Disappointed by the sterility of Keats’ House Museum (which features a table the poet never sat at) and disturbed by the ‘oddly stilted’ curation of Monk’s House, in which Woolf’s desk is ‘a curiosity in a zoo’, da Cunha Lewin nonetheless finds herself delighted by the enthusiasm of the volunteers she encounters, a testament to the sometimes fanatical fascination these preserved spaces continue to exert.
Writing is a kind of imaginative world-building that necessitates the creation of its own material worlds; as Woolf herself famously wrote, ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write’. No wonder we’re so fascinated by surviving writer’s rooms, which offer a chance to come close to, or more thrillingly to work alongside, the traces of genius. Visitors can even pay to work in Mark Twain’s writing room at his Connecticut house, although not at the desk itself, in a strange kind of religious pilgrimage-meets-theme park experience, while unopened packs of Moleskines from Didion’s 2022 estate sale sold for $11,000 each. Cult objects, the trappings of genius, they suggest the writer as lifestyle icon more than literary labourer.
Yet not all writers possess the resources required to build their ‘room of one’s own’. The ‘problem of the writer’s room’ is simple: ‘not everyone has one’. da Cunha Lewin is alert to who is excluded from the mythology of the writer’s room, as well as the hidden labour which goes into maintaining it. If the solitary writer’s room operates as a kind of ‘credential’ for writerliness, ‘an assurance of the quality of the output of the person who works there’, how do we judge those who cannot possess their own? In 2017, former Prime Minister David Cameron purchased a luxury shepherd’s hut in which to pen his forthcoming memoir. As da Cunha Lewin puts it, the £25,000 hut ‘seemed to be designed to present him publicly as an author, while simultaneously sloughing off the more unpalatable aspects of his privilege’, in an attempt at post-Brexit image management.
Cameron’s writerly man-cave is far from the efforts of the 1980s feminist collective Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, crowded in shared spaces to do challenging, communal work, or the British-Pakistani writer Hanif Kureishi, who, in the aftermath of a paralysing accident, now works in collaboration with his son Carlo. Or, indeed from da Cunha Lewin herself, who writes about shuffling her second-hand desk between rooms in a small flat, in order to make space for her new baby. In the midst of the housing and cost of living crises, her reflections have edge.
When the popular image of the writing life is bound up with the possession of property and boundless free time, does it simply become a symbol of middle class, masculine prosperity? Perhaps that’s why online aesthetics like ‘dark academia’, ‘thought daughter’, or ‘literary it girl’ hold such appeal: they offer a way for those without means to build up a digital writer’s room, captured in Pinterest mood-boards or on carefully curated blogs.
The myth of the writerly genius locked up in their garret requires intense work in isolation, preserving the life of the mind above both social life and the realities of the body. Yet the labour of writing is often done in common, whether co-working in a library alongside other writers, amid the bustle of a cafe, or at the kitchen table surrounded by screaming children. Feminists from Woolf on have critiqued the additional barriers which face the female writer. As the poet Alta Gerrey wrote in Momma, her 1974 work on motherhood, writing becomes just one task amid a litany of labours, ‘snatch[ed]’ in ‘quiet moments’ between ‘applying bandages, rinsing out bottles, wiping bottoms’ and so on. Yet creativity, da Cunha Lewin suggests, ‘might not always be tied to being solitary’. If the writer’s job is to observe reality and translate it onto the page, it must entail stepping outside of one’s splendid isolation, cracking open the door to the room of one’s own. As Woolf herself acknowledged, Jane Austen’s novels emerged from the unique circumstances of writing privately in public: ‘Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room.’
We are all in some way ‘enmeshed with others’, networks of reciprocity which extend beyond the individual writer’s life when their home is preserved for posterity. There is a politics to this preservation too, as da Cunha Lewin finds in a section on ‘Chez Baldwin’, James Baldwin’s final home in the French town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, destroyed by property developers after the author’s family struggled to buy them out. There may be no one way of being a writer, but the heritage industry paints a very particular picture, one which reproduces real world inequalities, including the continuing economic marginalisation of Black Americans.
da Cunha Lewin defends the worth of the writing life in all its myriad, changeable locations, even — especially — when it does not live up to the seductive mythology of the writer’s room. Indeed, that mythology has rarely encapsulated an entire reality. Here, we travel with Charles Dickens, who embedded wheels into the legs of his study furniture to enable it to travel with him, and Lauren Elkin, scribbling in her phone’s Notes app to produce her No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute. Writers have always snatched spare moments and worked on the go, although this ‘creation-on-the-fly, across multiple platforms and spaces’ might be a defining feature of our contemporary culture. Immaterial, scattered, and piecemeal, mediated by far more technology than just pen and paper, contemporary writing spaces are rarely tied to the static space of the writer’s room.
How we will preserve these 21st-century writing spaces for future audiences is an important question for da Cunha Lewin, one which archivists would do well to heed. Technology can provide new insights into writers’ lives and works, while raising new ethical conundrums — when AI can easily mimic the style of any particular writer, does the labour of writing lose all meaning, no matter where it takes place?
The Writer’s Room is a delightful book, brimming with warmth and insight. In an age when making a living by the writing life — Woolf’s requirement for ‘money and a room of her own’ — feels more far-off than ever, it offers a heartening reminder that writers, and writing, have always persisted. Whether we sit at our dream desk or not, we have always carved out spaces to create whole new worlds in words.
What I have done with my library desk is to build myself a writer’s room when I lack one of my own. In The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love, Katie da Cunha Lewin explores the mythology of the writer’s room, questioning why we’re so obsessed with the living and working spaces of our favourite writers. From Joan Didion’s California studio to Virginia Woolf’s Sussex garden study, not to mention the fantasy desks we dream up for ourselves, the writer’s room exerts a particular power over our imaginations. We have a clear mental image of this archetypal room, even if we can’t quite picture the working writer within it — a calm, cosy, yet somewhat ramshackle space, with a busy desk and overflowing bookshelves, objets d’art and kitschy tchotchkes littered throughout as spurs to the creative process. This archetypal writing space, as da Cunha Lewin suggests, exists ‘outside of time, outside of the architecture of the house, freed from the everyday’.
The fantasy of the writer’s room is just that: a fantasy. Its enduring image is borrowed from canonical images and tropes preserved in films and artworks, as well as the curatorial efforts of the literary tourism industry, rather than the reality of the writer’s life. Today, a whole industry exists around its allure, encompassing both historic houses like Woolf’s Monk’s House and social media posts with tags like #darkacademia or #thoughtdaughter. Unsurprisingly, Woolf is da Cunha Lewin’s touchstone, but The Writer’s Room explores an impressive array of writers, including James Baldwin, Agatha Christie, Zadie Smith, Ernest Hemingway, Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, and Sally Rooney, as well as a host of famous houses, which da Cunha Lewin visits in person and via the virtual tours which many museums provided during the pandemic.
As anyone who has visited one knows, these literary houses are strange places, frozen in time to give the impression of a mind alive with creative genius. Disappointed by the sterility of Keats’ House Museum (which features a table the poet never sat at) and disturbed by the ‘oddly stilted’ curation of Monk’s House, in which Woolf’s desk is ‘a curiosity in a zoo’, da Cunha Lewin nonetheless finds herself delighted by the enthusiasm of the volunteers she encounters, a testament to the sometimes fanatical fascination these preserved spaces continue to exert.
Writing is a kind of imaginative world-building that necessitates the creation of its own material worlds; as Woolf herself famously wrote, ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write’. No wonder we’re so fascinated by surviving writer’s rooms, which offer a chance to come close to, or more thrillingly to work alongside, the traces of genius. Visitors can even pay to work in Mark Twain’s writing room at his Connecticut house, although not at the desk itself, in a strange kind of religious pilgrimage-meets-theme park experience, while unopened packs of Moleskines from Didion’s 2022 estate sale sold for $11,000 each. Cult objects, the trappings of genius, they suggest the writer as lifestyle icon more than literary labourer.
Yet not all writers possess the resources required to build their ‘room of one’s own’. The ‘problem of the writer’s room’ is simple: ‘not everyone has one’. da Cunha Lewin is alert to who is excluded from the mythology of the writer’s room, as well as the hidden labour which goes into maintaining it. If the solitary writer’s room operates as a kind of ‘credential’ for writerliness, ‘an assurance of the quality of the output of the person who works there’, how do we judge those who cannot possess their own? In 2017, former Prime Minister David Cameron purchased a luxury shepherd’s hut in which to pen his forthcoming memoir. As da Cunha Lewin puts it, the £25,000 hut ‘seemed to be designed to present him publicly as an author, while simultaneously sloughing off the more unpalatable aspects of his privilege’, in an attempt at post-Brexit image management.
Cameron’s writerly man-cave is far from the efforts of the 1980s feminist collective Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, crowded in shared spaces to do challenging, communal work, or the British-Pakistani writer Hanif Kureishi, who, in the aftermath of a paralysing accident, now works in collaboration with his son Carlo. Or, indeed from da Cunha Lewin herself, who writes about shuffling her second-hand desk between rooms in a small flat, in order to make space for her new baby. In the midst of the housing and cost of living crises, her reflections have edge.
When the popular image of the writing life is bound up with the possession of property and boundless free time, does it simply become a symbol of middle class, masculine prosperity? Perhaps that’s why online aesthetics like ‘dark academia’, ‘thought daughter’, or ‘literary it girl’ hold such appeal: they offer a way for those without means to build up a digital writer’s room, captured in Pinterest mood-boards or on carefully curated blogs.
The myth of the writerly genius locked up in their garret requires intense work in isolation, preserving the life of the mind above both social life and the realities of the body. Yet the labour of writing is often done in common, whether co-working in a library alongside other writers, amid the bustle of a cafe, or at the kitchen table surrounded by screaming children. Feminists from Woolf on have critiqued the additional barriers which face the female writer. As the poet Alta Gerrey wrote in Momma, her 1974 work on motherhood, writing becomes just one task amid a litany of labours, ‘snatch[ed]’ in ‘quiet moments’ between ‘applying bandages, rinsing out bottles, wiping bottoms’ and so on. Yet creativity, da Cunha Lewin suggests, ‘might not always be tied to being solitary’. If the writer’s job is to observe reality and translate it onto the page, it must entail stepping outside of one’s splendid isolation, cracking open the door to the room of one’s own. As Woolf herself acknowledged, Jane Austen’s novels emerged from the unique circumstances of writing privately in public: ‘Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room.’
We are all in some way ‘enmeshed with others’, networks of reciprocity which extend beyond the individual writer’s life when their home is preserved for posterity. There is a politics to this preservation too, as da Cunha Lewin finds in a section on ‘Chez Baldwin’, James Baldwin’s final home in the French town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, destroyed by property developers after the author’s family struggled to buy them out. There may be no one way of being a writer, but the heritage industry paints a very particular picture, one which reproduces real world inequalities, including the continuing economic marginalisation of Black Americans.
da Cunha Lewin defends the worth of the writing life in all its myriad, changeable locations, even — especially — when it does not live up to the seductive mythology of the writer’s room. Indeed, that mythology has rarely encapsulated an entire reality. Here, we travel with Charles Dickens, who embedded wheels into the legs of his study furniture to enable it to travel with him, and Lauren Elkin, scribbling in her phone’s Notes app to produce her No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute. Writers have always snatched spare moments and worked on the go, although this ‘creation-on-the-fly, across multiple platforms and spaces’ might be a defining feature of our contemporary culture. Immaterial, scattered, and piecemeal, mediated by far more technology than just pen and paper, contemporary writing spaces are rarely tied to the static space of the writer’s room.
How we will preserve these 21st-century writing spaces for future audiences is an important question for da Cunha Lewin, one which archivists would do well to heed. Technology can provide new insights into writers’ lives and works, while raising new ethical conundrums — when AI can easily mimic the style of any particular writer, does the labour of writing lose all meaning, no matter where it takes place?
The Writer’s Room is a delightful book, brimming with warmth and insight. In an age when making a living by the writing life — Woolf’s requirement for ‘money and a room of her own’ — feels more far-off than ever, it offers a heartening reminder that writers, and writing, have always persisted. Whether we sit at our dream desk or not, we have always carved out spaces to create whole new worlds in words.