f I tell you I didn’t have a bed frame until I was 44 years old, can we all pretend I was a minimalist and not some odd bird flapping her wings all over the country? “Peripatetic” was a word I learned when I was in my early 20s – I remember looking it up after reading it somewhere, and thinking: “That sounds familiar.” I grew up in a small town in Illinois, where I lived until I went to university in Baltimore; but once I graduated I went on the run across the US, as if someone were chasing me, or as if I were running towards something – at the time, I could never truly decide which. During that time my mother had nicknamed me “the Wandering Jew”, which was a term for both a mythical man cursed to walk the earth until the second coming and a purple plant that thrives in wet regions (I chose to identify with the plant). My parents watched that spark ignite within me, beginning with a year at college, studying at the University of East Anglia where I spent my holidays with the rest of the diligent American travellers backpacking through Europe, sleeping in grimy youth hostels or upright on overnight trains. There I fell in and out with people on the road, and we always looked out for each other. Once, when I was completely out of cash – which happened frequently in the days before there was an ATM on every corner – I randomly ran into a friend from the States in front of Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and she bought me breakfast. I fell upon the food without even looking up. What an absolutely irresponsible thrill-seeking adventurer I thought I was, out there on my own. I had sought permission my entire life to make choices; I had been well-behaved and studious as a youth, jumped through all the required hoops – academic, extracurricular and otherwise. But freedom was to be explored and exploited, I had now decided. These travels taught me that moving around wherever I liked was possible. And that I was always at home as long as I had a few necessary items: a journal, some blue jeans, a few ducats and, most of all, a sharp mind. It was fortunate that I did not require much in the way of material objects, because for a long time I would live without many of the basic accessories of life – at least as recommended by home decoration magazines. After graduating from college in Baltimore, I couchsurfed in Virginia for a few months, followed by a six-month stint sharing an apartment with a college roommate in Tampa, Florida, and then a year and a half back up north in Washington DC, where I had several apartments, including one with a hole in my bedroom floor, which I nimbly stepped over nightly on to the ancient mattress I had inherited with the room. I was too busy hustling work – for years, I paid my bills by working temp jobs and in the service industry – and running around town to know if I was satisfied with my life or not. I was just happy to have a bed. All told, I lived in eight homes during that time, acquiring virtually nothing but more scribbled-in notebooks, which I carted around with me for two decades. When you move from rental to rental, furniture often comes with a room. Or I acquired things cheaply. Sometimes, I sold what I had to the tenant who was taking my place, or gave it away to a friend. Sometimes it just got left, depending on its state. Nothing I owned was of any monetary worth – it was either made of particle board or purchased at thrift shops, used rather than vintage – and, anyway, I never owned any of it for very long, so it had no sentimental value. I lived in a perennial state of either garbage-picking, or leaving my junk for others. Eventually I tired of DC. There was nothing for me there, I decided, a refrain that would become common enough in my life. I walked away so quickly from everything; I did this for years. A résumé littered with jobs lasting 12 months or less. (“Capricious” was a word my high-school French teacher called me, when I dropped her class after one year. I had to look that one up, too.) I had a degree in creative writing, but it didn’t seem plausible that I could actually become a writer, so it was best to see what else was out there. Which risks were worth it, I wondered? What could I possibly gain by settling down somewhere? Brief stints in Chicago and Atlanta followed. There was a month spent in New Orleans, crashing on the couch of two members of a band called Galactic Prophylactic, and I remember waking up on the 30th day in a row of being hungover and thinking, I like to have fun, but not this much fun. It was 1995. Onward, west, to Seattle, after a month on the road. When I arrived I thought: I guess I’ll stay here for a while, because I can’t drive straight into the water, now can I? It was there that a recovering junkie friend explained to me the term “doing a geographic”, a concept reportedly born among members of Alcoholics Anonymous, which means moving to a new city or state instead of facing one’s problems. I wasn’t an addict, not specifically, except perhaps to moving on to whatever was next. Only now it is clear that, as much as I was running to what was out there, I was also running from myself, and from facing what I wanted to do with my life. The only thing I was ever good at truly was writing, but that did not seem like a thing one could actually do for a living. What kind of balls would it have taken to sit still for a second to give it a shot? I thought I was being another kind of brave by moving all over the US, and it’s true, I wasn’t a coward. But sometimes the real bravery comes from investing in yourself and your work. I just wasn’t ready yet. In Seattle, I lived first on a couch in a houseboat on Puget Sound, then in a rented house with two roommates and, finally, in a studio apartment. This last place was the most precious to me: the mattress pushed up in the corner of the small room, bay windows filled with sunlight when it stopped raining, fixtures from the 1950s, walls painted lemon yellow, a park across the street where children played football in the afternoon. Most precious of all was that it was all mine. Even if I eventually tired of it. A friend in New York, who was better employed, flew me to Manhattan for my 27th birthday, and after a highly charged weekend full of delicious meals and carousing through East Village dive bars and meatpacking-district clubs, I woke up and thought: “There’s nothing for me in Seattle!” Within two months, I made my way back east, to New York City, where I lived (mostly) for 18 years. I stayed in seven apartments during that time, although three of them were within the same block, which felt strangely like progress. In that building I slept each time on a loft bed, up a series of steps to a platform about six feet below the ceiling – no bed frame required. I also spent chunks of time in New Orleans, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland (both Oregon and Maine), not to mention the year after I turned 40, when I was flat broke and gave up my apartment for five months to couchsurf until more work came in and a book advance finally showed up. That wasn’t so long ago that I don’t remember what it feels like to be desperate. I was able to make do. We surprise ourselves with what we are capable of tolerating in order to survive. I must tell you that the cheerful sense of adventure I had in my 20s had given way to a sense of humility in my 40s, when it came to this kind of living. That community of artists and travellers I had fallen in love with so long ago was still thriving; I was grateful to my friends for giving me a home. And I accepted that I had chosen the life of an artist, and that there were ups and downs with it. But I was tired. During that time, if I was lucky, I’d be housesitting an empty home, so I wouldn’t have to explain my actions. The true humbling came when I stayed in a guest bedroom. Friends were always happy to spend time with me for the first few days, but I could tell that some of them were concerned for me. And I didn’t want anyone to worry about me or pity me. I swore I knew what I was doing. Didn’t I? I called my mother to discuss my peripatetic life. “I think the most nervous we were was when you were shuttling around those five years after college,” she said. “We raised you to be independent and spread your wings, but sometimes we would say, ‘Maybe we went a little too far with that.’” I asked her why she thought I moved around so much. “I think you were trying to figure out who you were and what you loved to do, and how to make that a part of your life. The one way we knew you were settling down somewhere was when you would tell us you got a library card. ‘Well, she’s putting down roots,’ we’d say.” I used to have so many library cards in my wallet. In my 30s and 40s, I was working off the theory that home was in books; as long as I could read and write, I had a kind of comfort. My books were my home within me. Life got easier once I figured that out and started writing novels, at last. I was creating a space inside, whatever my project was; I built the structure, I painted the walls. But even those homes were temporary: every few years I moved on to creating a new book. It was easy to view everything from an emotional distance because there was always somewhere else to go in another direction. The concept of homesickness was vague to me: if you keep moving, there’s nowhere to really miss. Not everyone needs to intellectualise it that much, though. Home can be wherever your family is, or with your lover, who holds you close. Home can be you and your sweet dog. Or home can be with your faith. For the fortunate, the privileged, those with a roof over their head and food in their cupboard, those not imprisoned, we are all wildly lucky to have a place of our own. That, I always knew. I never took any of it for granted. I was lucky to have a door I could shut. Any door at all would do. Now, I have a home in New Orleans, a house I bought myself four years ago. My hard work finally paid off and my books started to sell. I chose this city because I love it. I chose this tiny shotgun house, with its rectangle-shaped back yard, its earth laced with shells washed ashore many years ago from the Mississippi river, which flows six blocks away. Lately, hummingbirds have taken to buzzing about the jasmine outside my office window. And when I moved into this house, the first thing I did was buy a mattress and a bed frame – bronze, linear, minimalist. I am staying here, I thought. I am ready to commit. I had calmed down; I had situated myself in the world. All that time, I thought I was racing around to nowhere in particular but I was acquiring knowledge and experience along the way. I could revisit the questions of my youth with a different kind of authority: which risks are worth it? What could possibly be gained by settling down right now? For a bed frame, it is still fairly low to the ground, a state to which I have grown accustomed. But it makes me feel elevated, nonetheless. I have a friend who recently packed up her life in New York and moved to Northern Ireland to write and continue her education. She had a tiny apartment – less than 400 square feet – which she lived in for nearly two decades. It was beautifully decorated with art and family heirlooms, the interior of her home somehow both regal and cosy, a miniature palace in south Brooklyn. Though I was thrilled for her new adventure, I had a hard time imagining her anywhere but her impeccable home, which in my mind was a specific part of her identity. She put many of her possessions in storage, but also sold things to friends. What would you take with you to another land? Recently we video-chatted for the first time, and behind her in her kitchen, I saw some familiar green plates. I commented on them. “Yes, they were my uncle’s,” she said, smiling in her reminiscence of him; a radical lawyer, he had been beloved to many. She was able to make her new house her home with just a boxful of familiar objects. I look at the things I have now. What would I take if I had to move? What if I had a smaller home? What if it all went away tomorrow? What would I need to make a home? I’d like to think I could survive as I did for so long. I hope I don’t have to decide. I pace these floors lately. I walk through my home, I contemplate my space. Here, for now, and for a long time to come. And I take this moment to be grateful for what I have. A roof, a notebook, a full cupboard, and a bed above ground. All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg is published by Serpent’s Tail (£14.99). To order a copy for £13.04, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.