A writer's house

This article originally appeared in The National Post.

A few months ago, my fiancé, Christopher Shulgan, and I decided to buy a new home together. Chris and I are both writers. Living with a writer has many benefits. Chris gets that I do my best writing in bed, under the covers, even if it’s two o’clock in the afternoon. And I get it when he’s so wrapped up in his writing that he forgets to take off his lucky ping-pong wool toque after an early morning writing session to walk his kids to school. When he’s on a deadline, I’ll make dinner. When I’m on a deadline, he does … well, everything.

So when it came to buying a new home, we didn’t really need to discuss what we wanted. We both wanted the same thing: a writer’s haven in the heart of the city. A contradiction? Maybe to some, but not to us. We’d both lived in homes that weren’t writers’ homes. They weren’t even readers’ homes. And we wanted a home where we could write, and where we could read. Chris and I read bedtime stories to his children for nearly an hour before bed every night. And every few months, Chris and I have our own little mini-bookclub, where we’ll buy the same book and read it at the same time so we can discuss it. We wanted a home that encouraged reading.

A few days after we decided to put Chris’s Trinity-Bellwoods row house on the market, we rode our bikes to our first open house. It was a grand old three-storey Victorian in Kensington Market, with tall skinny windows and high, slanted ceilings. There was a great porch where we envisioned reading books in old wooden rocking chairs or in a hammock from the massive old tree in the front lawn. Inside, there were cozy corners and hidden nooks in every room. The walls were lined with bookshelves. But this was more than just a readers’ home – it was a writers’ home.

Chris was the one who felt it first. The books weren’t books a regular reader would read, he thought. They were books a writer would read. While he tried to figure out which Toronto author might currently live in this house, I snuck away to the third floor, where I found a study. I nonchalantly glanced at a piece of mail on the desk. “Isn’t that illegal?” Chris whispered when I revealed the name on the front of the envelope. But I hadn’t opened the mail. I hadn’t even touched the envelope. I’d just channeled my inner Nancy Drew and looked very closely. Surely channeling my favourite childhood heroine was an acceptable act. The house turned out to belong to a well-known writer, one who’d won a Governor General’s Literary Award, one who’d made this home an important setting in one of his books.

The house was taking offers the next day – but we hadn’t even listed Chris’s house yet, never mind gotten pre-approved for a mortgage. And so, begrudgingly, we put the house – this house we knew we’d never find again – out of our minds, and told ourselves there’d be other houses we’d like, if not love.

A few weeks passed. Chris’s house sold, and we looked at a dozen other houses in various neighbourhoods. Nothing was quite right. Practically speaking, they were too old or too new, too small or too unfinished, too far from amenities, or too close to the neighbours. But what they all really lacked was that feeling – that feeling of being a writer’s home.

One Sunday afternoon, we took a break — after seeing four houses in three hours — to buy me a new bicycle for the summer. We rode our bikes into Kensington market, and passed the old Victorian.

The For Sale sign was back on the lawn. We called our agent immediately. The offer from a few weeks earlier had fallen through. We told her we wanted to put in an offer immediately.

Eight grueling hours and a bidding war later we were the new owners of the house. The previous owner—the well-known writer—not only left us his bookcases, but a copy of his latest novel. It was sitting on one of the shelves in the living room. He’d inscribed the book, sending us best wishes for the happiest home of his life. We’ve only been at the new place for a couple of weeks, but it already feels like home. And I think it does because the previous owners helped prepare it, somehow. For new people who treasured books as much as they did.