![]() ![]() ![]() Next year some other student would put her feet up on my desk, doze in my armchair, make out on my squeaky single bed, puke in my sink-and the room would never know the difference. ![]() I could close my door, but I was never really alone, and it was never really mine. ![]() The rooms always had shared bathrooms up one flight of stairs and shared kitchens down another, friends across the hall, and fascinating semi-strangers above and below. There, I lived in a succession of semiprivate rooms, overlooking first a market square, then the library’s mullioned windows. I followed my obsession with Woolf and her Bloomsbury friends to Cambridge, studying and taking my degree alongside the boys as she could not. I never particularly worried about how I would manage the other part of the equation that Woolf lays out, the 500 a year or whatever that would be today, in London or Paris or New York or wherever my room happened to be. I was always, in these dreams, in the middle of some great creative project, never at the tentative beginning or the slog-like end, never stuck and procrastinating by looking up pictures of bigger, better, prettier garrets online. I had no fantasies about my wedding day, only about my writing place: a little garret overlooking some scenic rooftops, precise location to be determined, where nobody, least of all my parents, could come in without knocking and accidentally banish the muse. Long before I read Virginia Woolf’s manifesto, my dreams of the future were creative and solitary. ![]()
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