A Place to Do the Writing

Nobody asked, but in case you were wondering, I wrote Such Good Friends at a small, elegant 19th-century Danish farmhouse table that I purchased in the mid-1980s in a now-disappeared antiques shop in SoHo. It worked perfectly in the Brooklyn Heights apartment I occupied for forty years, where I could sit at the back windows in the morning and gaze at the shady garden with the New York Times and a cup of coffee in front of me. But in my “new” place in Sunset Park--where I've lived already for six years...!--the table is perfect for writing in the south-facing living room, where the sun is bright all day.

I do have a proper desk of walnut, a massive, seven-drawered thing that weighs a ton, that’s now in the bedroom, which I use look over the current issue of The Economist and The New York Review of Books. Because the light was so good in its spot in the Brooklyn Heights place, that desk was where used to write everything. It's a battered-but-noble piece of business furniture that my partner and I bought in the 1970s, right off the sidewalk in midtown Manhattan, after a furrier had gone out of business and was being moved out of the building. At the moment, that desk is piled high with books and features a host of little nothings I find interesting, like ticket stubs, post cards, curiously shaped stones, an antique oil can, a little celedon dish from Gump’s containing a chip of molding I knocked off the bottom of the armoire with the vacuum cleaner, and the bisque torso of an old Kewpie doll that I found in a field one summer, long ago, when I had a summer job as a surveyor’s assistant. Actually, among the books piled up there are several I used in my research for Such Good Friends, including Gerald Clarke's excellent biography Capote and Diana Dubois' fascinating In Her Sister's Shadow: An Intimate Biography of Lee Radziwill…