life for rent

After a traumatic break-up, Olivia Laing spent three years subletting in New York, trying on different lives for size. She revisits the dislocation and liberation of that experience

You’d think a nomadic life would make you feel unsettled, but for one writer, her Airbnb existence had the opposite effect.

My time as a subletter in New York did not begin auspiciously. I went because I was unhappy and because, like a million people before me, I thought my life might improve there. I was right about that, though it took long enough: years of coming and going on tourist visas, drifting between borrowed rooms and temporary apartments, shuttling up and down Manhattan with my possessions on the subway.

I arrived in the autumn of 2011. My first apartment was in Brooklyn Heights and it belonged to my friend David – a masculine studio with Keith Haring prints on the walls and Prada shirts hung neatly in the wardrobe. The kitchenette was stocked with half-eaten gourmet chocolate bars, and the little windowless bathroom was tiled all in black.

Most evenings, I’d lie in there with the lights off, show tunes filtering down from the apartment upstairs, trying to figure out what I was doing so far from home. I’d fallen in love – that was the trouble. I’d fallen in love with a New Yorker, who asked me far too quickly to join him in the city. Yes, I said, but a few weeks later he changed his mind, telling me via Skype as I crouched in a bustling train station with patchy wi-fi. I was devastated. I’d pinned far too many hopes on him and the implosion left me shattered.

I’d had difficult break-ups before, but this one unmoored me completely, partly because I hadn’t seen it coming and partly because of my age. I was almost 35, a point at which being alone becomes increasingly socially unsanctioned, a source not of potential or excitement but of gathering shame. Everyone at home was getting married and having babies, buying houses I couldn’t begin to afford. Meanwhile, I was living in a rented flat, single yet again. I loved my work, but I was feeling increasingly out of sync with my social circle. Being offered a new life in the US had made me realise how deeply unsatisfied I was at home. I’d been ecstatic at the idea of shaking up my life, and after the break-up I began to wonder whether I could make the move alone.

New York had struck me as a city that was generous to the solitary and unaligned, and I had an instinct that it might still be a nourishing place for me. But spending time there wouldn’t have been possible without the unexpected miracle of subletting. Most of my friends in the city were artists and writers, on peripatetic touring schedules. They initiated me into an informal network of temporary sublets, advertised by email lists and Facebook introductions, and far cheaper than the equivalent spaces on Airbnb.

My visa meant I couldn’t get a job in the US or stay for more than three months at a time, but that didn’t matter. Writing is a lonely, badly paid business, but it does have one advantage: you can do it anywhere in the world. And not having a partner or a child meant I was without ties. I booked a flight, found a friend to temporarily take over the tenancy of my apartment and entered the strange, magical world of the subletter.

The Brooklyn Heights period was the most difficult of my subletting years – I was still tangled up in heartbreak and I was getting to grips with New York itself: working out where to shop and do my laundry, reconditioning myself to fit the city’s gears. I realised the best way of handling the emotional dislocation of subletting was to establish a castiron routine. Every morning I’d walk to a cafe, where I’d have a latte and struggle to work. After a week or two,

“SUBLETTING WAS A PRIVILEGE... IT WAS EXHILARATING TO LET GO OF WHO I THOUGHT I WAS AND EMBRACE THE POSSIBILITIES OF BOLDER WAYS OF LIVING”

they knew my order. A small thing, but in my state of disconnection it was a tiny anchor, tethering me to the city.

The problem was that I was living in the neighbourhood I would have shared with my ex-boyfriend. The entire time I was there I was haunted by the other, better life I could have been living: I could have been one of the couples I saw eating a late dinner, or wandering the farmers’ market, hands entwined. It was a relief, really, when David came back from LA and I had to move on, into the city itself.

I loved Manhattan from the first moment I saw it, the towers glittering like needles on the horizon. Magnetic and improbable, it is still the only place where I’ve ever felt entirely at home. I loved the quickness, the speed that people walked. I loved the cherry blossom in spring and the yellow leaves in autumn, the shoals of taxis, the polluted blue evening air, the reek of East Houston in summer, the way you can walk right across the island.

My next apartment was in the East Village: an unreconstructed thirdfloor walk-up with a bathtub in the kitchen and a platform bed. It even had a fire escape, where I could crouch with a beer and watch the moon. It belonged to a friend who had been there since the ’80s. She was out of town and had arranged a key handover with a stranger in a Korean deli. He turned up an hour late and high, in an incongruous cowboy hat.

That was the neighbourhood all over: chaotic, warm, a melting pot of class, race, age and social status. You could hear 10 languages a minute on Avenue A; encounter street kids and bankers side by side on the benches in Tompkins Square Park. Perhaps due to this diversity, I felt at home more quickly this time. I didn’t feel so visible among the homogeneous couples, so I could be more outgoing. I got to know the girls in my local deli, and the man in the Vietnamese cafe underneath my apartment, who’d chat while making banh mi. I went to book readings and art openings and spent nights dancing with drag queens at Drom.

One evening, I saw an elegant elderly woman eating dinner alone at a restaurant in the West Village. She was reading a copy of The New Yorker, drinking a glass of red and looking absolutely content. Inspired, I started venturing out alone more often, rather than hiding at home when I didn’t have plans with friends. I’d eat at the bar of restaurants alongside other amiable solo diners, or take my book to the local dive for a bourbon and ice.

New York was up for that, as it was up for any permutation of living arrangement. We were all crammed together, and the only way to survive it was to become radically tolerant of other people’s lives. This was a lesson I learned most forcibly in a studio on Times Square that belonged to an acquaintance of an acquaintance, a woman I’d never met. In an email she told me that the room was very small, warning me too about the traffic and the giant neon ads, which drenched the room with artificial light.

What she didn’t mention was that the building was a refuge, renting cheap rooms to working professionals in addition to housing a more or less permanent population of the long-term homeless, particularly people with mental-health problems. It was the loudest place I’d ever lived, but I liked the people there, especially the tough trans girls throwing shade in the elevators about each other’s outfits.

Over the next two years, I lived in a dozen different places. I spent a spring in a sculptor’s apartment on the Lower East Side, where I had to pick my way around clay models of women mummified in bubble wrap. I cat-sat for a Columbia University professor, in rooms that were barely furnished but full of wobbly towers of books. I had a blissful summer week in a studio on East 8th Street with a dangerously rickety rooftop, where I sunbathed amid rubble and drank wine with my friends. Each time I moved I felt liberated, more at ease with change, more steady on my feet.

The thing about subletting, I started to realise, was it gave you the chance to see how others organised their lives, to try them out. It was a privilege, even if it could be lonely and disconcerting. Sometimes, after months surrounded by someone else’s possessions, I felt like a voyeur or a ghost, but mostly it was exhilarating to let go of who I thought I was and embrace the possibilities of bolder ways of living.

It had to come to an end eventually, though. After years of drifting, I became clearer about what I wanted and what constituted a happy life. I returned home, exchanging an attic apartment for a tiny terraced house. I was still renting, but I put down roots: buying furniture and planting spring bulbs.

All the same, part of my heart will always be in New York. Friends are there, and it’s central to my life. “Welcome home,” said my friend last time I was in town. I spent a week at the old place in the East Village, taking candlelit baths in the kitchen tub, and then went back for the first time in years to Brooklyn Heights, to look after Martha, my friend Jean’s scruffy rescue terrier. Martha was determined I’d exorcise old ghosts – she insisted we walk dangerously close to my ex’s house. Walking those familiar streets, where I’d once been so unhappy, I could feel how much I’d changed – how much subletting changed me.

Living in all those wildly different places had taught me tolerance and flexibility, while moving so much had made me more comfortable engaging with strangers and handling difficult situations. I’d become self-assured and independent, a world away from my heartbroken self. Subletting had taught me, in short, how to be an adult: a woman unafraid of the world at large.