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How redecorating her home helped one author realize her true self.
I bought the painting while sitting in the garage of the house I lived in with my husband, a housewarming gift for the first home I would ever occupy by myself. The garage was on the first floor of a three-story townhouse in west Los Angeles that my husband and I bought a year-and-a-half after we got married. At the time, it was new construction in an up-and-coming neighborhood with great public schools. I was 27 and not sure I even wanted kids, but planning for them felt like an appropriately grown-up thing to do.
Decorating was a challenge. My husband and I had a tight budget and wildly different tastes, so we compromised on furniture neither of us really liked. The microfiber-and-pleather sectional we bought on clearance at Macy’s was comfortable at least.
Looking at photos from the early years in that house, I’m struck by how hideously the place was decorated, but also by how happy we look. But were we actually happy or just enthralled with our domesticity? Does it matter? Maybe happiness is hosting game nights and Christmas parties and baby showers with your spouse. Maybe it’s spilling red wine on a cheap microfiber couch and marveling at how easy it is to wipe up. Maybe it’s as simple as that. Until it isn’t anymore.
A month after I turned 29, I found out I was pregnant. Eventually, we brought that baby and then two more home to that house, which was, by kid number three, cluttered with bouncy seats and foam playmats and mismatched canvas toy bins. The life we’d built, like the home we lived in, got louder with kid voices, which kept the adults from noticing how little they had to say to one another. And me from realizing how far I’d drifted from myself.
Eleven years into our life in that house, I accidentally left the sink in the upstairs laundry room running. I was loading the dishwasher when my middle child yelled from the living room, “Mommy, it’s raining from the lights!” Within two hours, a remediation company had cut out three walls and a huge chunk of the ceiling to dry everything out.
It was a disaster, but ultimately, a fortuitous one. We used the money we got from insurance to renovate. Out came the cherry kitchen cabinets and speckled granite countertops I’d never liked. Down came the black glass paneling on the fireplace and the dated white mantel where we’d hung Christmas stockings every year. Off came the polyurethane coating on our white oak floors and the heavy curtains in the dining room. The dark brown walls were re-painted a crisp, modern white.
The Macy’s sectional was relocated to the garage playroom. I was determined that our new living room would not contain anything microfiber or pleather or any colors adjacent to taupe. I asked an artist friend if she could paint something for me to hang on the wall. “Clouds over an ocean,” I specified. “The calm before a storm.” It was an odd choice of subject matter. My subconscious knew something I didn’t yet.
I remember lying on our new living room rug one afternoon a few months after the renovation was complete, watching the sunlight stream in through the bay window onto the newly refinished floors and thinking, “this finally feels like my home.” It didn’t occur to me that I was thinking in singular possessive pronouns. And it didn’t bother me that I had made all of the design decisions by myself. I had, in the dozen years we’d lived at that address, become a woman who knew what she wanted: Neutral paint colors. Natural fibers. Loads of houseplants. A divorce.
When I moved down to the garage to sleep, I assumed it would be temporary. Not the separation from my husband, but my relegation to a part of the house that wasn’t even technically inside the house. I was willing to sleep on a deeply stained sectional that was by then probably filled with as many skin particles as polyester fluff, on the other side of an exterior door, because I was the one who wanted the separation. It didn’t occur to me that I might be the one to actually move out of the space I’d created. Eventually, my husband came to terms with what was happening, but with one caveat: He wanted to stay in the house.
Our marriage was ending for a thousand reasons, but part of it was my growing awareness that the housemate I really wanted wasn’t a husband, but a wife. In the time since the laundry room sink overflowed, I’d written and sold a novel about two female architects who fall profoundly in love. Maybe I was inspired by my own renovation, or maybe architecture as a metaphor for female homemaking was just too interesting to pass up. Either way, it felt more than a little symbolic that each of my female characters designs a home for herself following a divorce. Now here I was, six months after selling my manuscript, facing the reality of my own marriage ending and the choice between fighting for the home I’d already created or starting over on a new one.
The night I made the decision to move out, I bought a piece of art. An acrylic painting by a Spanish artist named Marina Del Pozo that took my breath away when I first saw it, scrolling through Art Finder on my phone from the garage. It’s the image of a woman floating on her back in the ocean, an expression of pure tranquility on her face. I bought it right then, even though I didn’t have a place to hang it yet.
A few weeks later, a realtor friend sent me the listing of a house for sale a few miles away. A small, hundred-year-old, single-story Spanish-style bungalow with barreled ceilings, Saltillo tile, and a grassy back yard with an old avocado tree, fruiting grapevines and a wall of bright bougainvillea. I knew I would live there the moment I saw it. It felt more like my home than the house I’d inhabited for 13 years ever had.
This feeling of home-ness wasn’t because this new place fit my taste more than the old one had, though that was true. I felt at home because – at 41, divorced, newly out as a queer woman – I had finally returned to myself.
The painting arrived a few weeks after I moved in. The packing slip listed the title, which I hadn’t noticed before. After the Storm. It was an unexpected name for a painting of a woman floating on her back in clear water. It’s possible the artist was trying to capture the quiet peace that happens sometimes after a hard rain. Or maybe the storm the woman had weathered was inside of her, the way my own storm had been.
After the Storm fit perfectly on the living room wall, as if it had been made specifically for the space. Above it, I hung a cow skull. My great-grandmother’s antique writing desk is nearby, along with a potted Bird of Paradise, a wooden lamp my dad made and my parents’ old Persian rug. “It’s so you,” says every person who comes over, and then, invariably, they ask how I pulled it together so fast.
“I went with my instincts,” I tell them. Which is also the answer to other questions that are harder for people to ask. But for me, they’re all connected. My divorce, my emerging queerness, my perfect little house. When I gave myself permission to trust myself, the decisions were easy. Turns out I know what I like.
Lauren McBrayer is a working mom of three and the head of business affairs for an entertainment company in Los Angeles. A graduate of Yale with a law degree from UC Berkeley, Like a House on Fire is her adult debut novel. This essay is part of a series highlighting the Good Housekeeping Book Club — you can join the conversation and check out more of our favorite book recommendations.
Lauren McBrayer is a graduate of Yale with a law degree from UC Berkeley. A working mom of three, she is the head of business affairs for an entertainment company in Los Angeles. Like a House on Fire is her adult debut.
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