Camille Bordas

I moved to Chicago five years ago with basically nothing, my own fantasy of a life that fits in a suitcase. I like to reduce — I’m a sentimental person but can throw things away very easily — and I’m always aiming for a completely bare space in which to work. But then I tend to accumulate things, books and little trinkets. It’s just as well because I need something to sort through before I get to work. I have to make and then remake my own mess. It’s a constant opposition between chaos and order.

In Paris I worked in cafes, but I’ve taken to having my own space. My desk, a gift from my mother, is gigantic. On it there are stacks of printed drafts and a set of notebooks: one for fiction, one for pasted images, one for doodling in while I’m on the phone. That’s a pile to organize. There are also a thousand pencils I don’t use in pots from this ceramics shop in Andalusia. And sleeves of Nicorette. There used to be cigarette packs and those looked better.

I’ve written three novels and started 20 others and still have no idea what makes me work well. I can work in the morning; I can work at night. I can work on coffee; I can work on beer. Sometimes I need to do something with my hands. There are spools of yarn from when I thought I’d take up weaving. Two years ago I was into making side tables and before that I did a whole quilt. I envy writers with a routine — and I live with one. I don’t know what my husband’s new novel is about, but sometimes he’ll knock on my door and ask me to enact something so he can describe it better, which is fun. At the end of the day we have dinner together.

Sitting here, I like to look at a painting my brother made, of a girl with bags under her eyes and a glass of something. On the bookshelf is a jar of dried bougainvillea petals from my sister’s 30th birthday. I didn’t set out to write a family novel, and my new book isn’t autobiographical, but being away from what’s familiar to me made me able to write something closer to home. As children we moved a lot, from Lyon to the Alps to Mexico City to Paris. That might be why I like to switch it up. Though I’ve been here for five years now. Maybe, for the next book, I’ll just have to rearrange the furniture.