A room with a muse / These celebrated Bay Area writers feel expansive in their compact, self-decorated work spaces

WRITERS_0060_fl.jpg Marin writer Anne Lamott and the room in her home where she does her work. The idea behind the story is that we're making a bit of a generalization about the idea that famous writers work in very small spaces, which they tend to personalize with photos and art, furniture, etc. that say something distinctive about themselves. 10/28/05 Fairfax CA Frederic Larson The San Francisco Chronicle less WRITERS_0060_fl.jpg Marin writer Anne Lamott and the room in her home where she does her work. The idea behind the story is that we're making a bit of a generalization about the idea that famous writers work in ... more Photo: Frederic Larson Photo: Frederic Larson Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close A room with a muse / These celebrated Bay Area writers feel expansive in their compact, self-decorated work spaces 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

I asked Marin writer Anne Lamott and three other Bay Area authors why they and so many other writers work in rooms that are literally closets, and none of them work in, say, ballrooms.

"Small spaces are more like cribs," Lamott said. "You feel much safer. To write in a ballroom would be like trying to sleep under a circus tent. Anyone in his or her right mind would have a nervous breakdown."

Lamott has written six novels and four works of nonfiction, including "Operating Instructions," an account of the year after she gave birth to her now-teenage son, Sam; "Bird by Bird," on writing; and two books on faith, "Traveling Mercies" and "Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith." She and Sam live in a house on the side of an oak-studded Marin County hill. Her office is a tiny room under the living room. Lamott says she loves her office because it's the first one she ever had and it reflects who she is.

"It looks just like me -- fabulous, disorganized, slightly goofy, intense, with lots of poems and religious stuff," she said.

There's a huge table next to her desk with several stacks of paper that include notes for writing projects. There are framed photos of her on the small bookshelves next to the desk as well as shots of her boyfriend, Rory.

Lamott's windows are filled with crazily out-of-control plants -- flowering potato plants, Japanese maples, a loquat tree.

"Or a kumquat tree, I can never remember the difference," she said.

Hummingbirds stop by all day. She planted everything so she could have a beautiful living screen between her office and the house next door.

Her desk is nearly a hundred years old. Her grandfather, Willis Lamott, bought it in Tokyo in 1919, when he and his wife (parents of Lamott's father and Aunt Eleanor) were Presbyterian missionaries. It is huge and ungainly, and has always been in the family -- her father, Ken Lamott, inherited it when her grandfather died, when she was 6, and wrote most of his books on it. She inherited it when her father died 26 years ago. She's written all of her books on it, too, except for "Hard Laughter."

"I used to use an Adler portable that my parents got me for my 18th birthday, but for the last 10 years, I have had a series of Macs. The one I am using now looks like an iMac, but is white, and is for people like me who have extremely -- almost aggressively -- limited computer skills," she said.

On one side of the wall beside her computer she has a print of a beautiful painting of Jesus -- although there is some controversy as to whether it is Jesus in a slightly femme robe, or Mary with 5 o'clock shadow. She doesn't actually care who it is because "the face and eyes are so exquisitely kind and beautiful," she said.

"The face is very Jewish; I look at it all day, every day," Lamott said.

On the other side of the computer, she has a poster of the Cellist of Sarajevo, Vedran Smailovic, in a tuxedo, sitting with his cello in the bombed-out ruins of Sarajevo, where he showed up during the war to play his beautiful music almost every day.

There are huge sheets of graph paper taped to every wall, with ideas scribbled on them, stories she wants to get to, ideas for endings, openings and structure, lines she loves and hopes to use somewhere.

She draws big circles in a line, to represent lily pads, so she can plot a story's trajectory. The first circle is what belongs near the beginning, the last circle is where she thinks the story might come to some sort of organic end, and the lily pads in between are places where she wants to spend time. Inside each circle, she scribbles down some of that section's details, moments and content.

Lamott used to have a clothesline strung from one side of the wall above her computer to the other, on which she would clip bits of manuscripts that she was working on, but she took it down when she painted the office (a soft, buttery Buddhist yellow) five years ago, and she keeps forgetting to put it back up.

"Menopause has not increased my focus and memory as much as I had been hoping," Lamott said. "The clothesline used to help me a lot because it was like hanging out clothing to dry, only it was my word fabric, like squares for a patchwork quilt. I could look up all day and see what stages various sections of the book were at. I stole the idea from (Marin novelist) Martin Cruz Smith about 15 years ago."

Amy Tan

"Joy Luck Club" author Tan used to write in a spacious room with three bay windows that overlook the Golden Gate Bridge and the sailboats on the bay, but she hung shades to block that view and finally retreated to a study off the stairs so small that she can entertain only one visitor at a time. The room is kept dim -- Tan finds even the light from a small south-facing window distracting.

Tan and her husband of 31 years, attorney Lou DeMattei, have lived since 1990 in one of six units in a brick building in Presidio Heights.

"My writing space needs are mirrored in this quote from Matisse," Tan said: " 'We have acquired a notion of limitless space, but we also find solace in the limited space of a room in our home full of the knickknacks that have accumulated in it through the years.' "

The aforementioned knickknacks are everywhere on Tan's gleaming built-in shelves -- ebony figures, some trinkets blessed by the Dalai Lama, a Zen saying, a Chinese doctor's hat. Tan is small and shining in purple silk. In her cradle-like Stokke chair, flown in from Norway to pamper a sore back, she can tip forward to type her prizewinning novels about Chinese mothers and their American daughters, backward to think -- perhaps about the libretto she is helping to write for an opera to be made of her novel "The Bonesetter's Daughter."

Behind the computer is a frame containing several black-and-white photos of her mother in Shanghai. "I would grab that if someone yelled fire," she said.

Her mother, Daisy, escaped on the last boat out of Shanghai before the Communist takeover in 1949, leaving behind three daughters before coming here to start another family. On the desk is a copy of Gus Lee's "China Boy," a memoir set in the Panhandle: "I call him my brother because his father once lived with my mother."

Born in Oakland in 1952, Tan got started on her career when a story that got her into the Squaw Valley Community of Writers became the 1989 best-seller "The Joy Luck Club." Her latest novel, "Saving Fish From Drowning," was released last month.

Although the office is amazingly neat for having so many objects in it, Tan apologizes for the mess and later e-mails to say that she has reorganized her shelves since the visit, "so that when you first glance at them you will be impressed at my complete collection of books by J.M. Coetzee and other erudite literary tomes, whereas the books on things like 'Keep Your Brain Alive' are discreetly out of view."

Lemony Snicket

If we cross the Panhandle and ascend to the upper Haight, we find 35-year-old Daniel Handler, who shows up at book events to speak for the perennially ill Lemony Snicket. He is squeezed into a room of his otherwise large, light-filled house that would have been called "the fainting room" by its Edwardian original inhabitants.

Snicket, by the way, is a pen name he adopted when researching right-wing organizations whose receptionists asked him for his name. Handler is eleven-thirteenths of the way through a planned 13-volume gothic marathon called "A Series of Unfortunate Events," on the woes of three orphaned children, Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire. He delivered the first manuscript to his editor with a note that said, "You'll love this ... the parents die on the first page."

"There's often the assumption that I must be cackling as I write, but actually it takes a lot out of me," he said. "I'll meet friends for drinks and they'll have to remind me that these are fictional orphans."

Handler's desk is a gynecologist's table (minus the stirrups), an effect that recalls Flaubert's advice: "Be regular and ordinary in your habits, like a petit bourgeois, so you may be violent and original in your work."

Handler doesn't understand the notion that some writers have trouble with the stay-at-home-all-day-and-write notion. "If you didn't like sitting around writing, why would you be a writer?"

In back of his chair is a low row of the volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, which he was given after he agreed to appear in an ad for the company and say what his favorite word was. "I chose 'defenestration,' " he recalled. "I was embarrassed when Doris Lessing chose 'justice.' "

Why not just look words up online? "If you're a word geek this is better," he said. To demonstrate, Handler picked up Vol. 10 and read at random from Page 840 that "the first appearance of the open-toed sandal" was in a book by Raymond Chandler.

A black file cabinet is stuffed with the tiny notebooks Handler uses to jot down ideas. It belonged to his wife's grandfather and still has his labels on it: "Sewing, Sun cream, Bulbs, Shaver, Soap."

Handler, often seen about town in his trademark baggy linen suit, is as local as it gets: He was born in San Francisco in 1970 and raised on Balboa Terrace, and his parents met at the San Francisco Opera when his mother was singing "Aida." Under his real name he has published two books for adults, including "The Basic Eight," which takes place in a school that resembles Handler's alma mater, Lowell High School.

Lisa Brown

His wife, Lisa Brown, has her own office several streets away in the basement of a house the couple owns and rents out. They have been married seven years and have known each other since college, when Handler had a seizure and passed out in Lisa's lap in a Chaucer class at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

Brown's office is bright and airy, as befits a writer who is also an illustrator. There's a dress form in the corner. She's working on a primer that tells babies how to mix drinks, an idea that began when their 21-month-old son, Otto, was born and Dad showed up at the hospital with bottles of vodka and vermouth and two martini glasses.

Brown has three books coming out for the holiday season, two for toddlers or, actually, for the parents of toddlers: "Baby Mix Me a Drink" and "Baby Make Me Breakfast." They are about putting one's infants to some use.

The other is a book that she did with Handler called "How to Dress for Every Occasion by the Pope." Brown illustrated and designed it under the name Sarah "Pinkie" Bennett, and Handler wrote the text under the name the Pope. It's a book of fashion tips.