Heard of the take your younger self out to coffee thing? I took mine to lunch and I was a nightmare.

I tried the TikTok thing, but with more shrimp tacos and less gentle nostalgia.

I’m Emily Grosvenor, a design magazine editor and the author of Find Yourself At Home. This newsletter is about designing homes for personality and values, neurospicy design, design in the media, and what I would do differently.

“Emily, I am taking you out to lunch today at Pura Vida, and you are ordering the shrimp tacos with the side of pickled onions and the tamarind black bean rice. You don’t even know what TikTok trends are, and you don’t like coffee yet, and I’m sure you don’t know what gluten is yet, and can’t imagine a life that doesn’t include gluten or dairy (since your favorite dinner is tiramisu), but someday there will be no comfort foods left. But there will be shrimp wrapped in handmade corn tortillas so big you have to unhinge your jaw to eat them alongside magenta onions so sour they make your mouth pucker.

Taste it now. Give yourself a Proustian madeleine so you can fall apart later when you taste it again. Sorry. I know you hate it when anyone tells you what to do.”

“My mom made me wear curlers to bed last night,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “Your hair is actually naturally wavy, so someday you can just scrunch and go.”

“Well, that’s something,” she says.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“I’m 9,” she says.

“I see you brought along your first diary, Emily, the one with a tiny lock. Let me read it. You can have the churros for dessert. I see you have catalogued all the A’s you are getting in school and the B+ in math and I can tell that you’re hoping on the page that that shameful B will change soon. You’re so funny — already writing for the public, already assuming that someone cares so much about your thoughts they will break open your diary. There are a few pages about liking Travis Mickel and then a few pages about how Briana stole your favorite pencil, but overall what I’m reading from all of this is your need to be seen as good. I can tell you like to live in your head. Maybe the imagination is the only place you can afford to make a mistake? Do you think that imagination is the currency out there in the world? What will happen when you realize the world hates what is quiet and soft and prefers audacious cruelty and inane self-absorption cut through with a hefty dose of humblebragging?

An actual spread from my third-grade diary.

I am sitting there next to you as you thumb through the collected books on your shelf in your room decorated with problematic Asian paraphernalia (fans? parasols? ceramic dolls in kimonos?).”

“I want to be Asian when I grow up,” she says.

“Yeah, I get that. You have always wanted to be something other than American, and while you never will be Asian, you will have many Asian friends who will expand your understanding of what that means. Your sister will marry a Chinese immigrant and you will get a niece and nephew who will fulfill that dream. Instead of searching for something better to the East, you will fall in love with a teacher not unlike Maria von Trapp. You discover that you feel more at home speaking German than English. It will feel like a private secret. Later, the language seeps into your writing and occasionally, someone will point out, not knowing this provenance, that your voice has changed. Most of the people who hear about your love of German will think it’s because of heritage — blood being the only thing that makes sense to them. But you won’t figure it out until much later: Germans understand what it takes to fall slowly day-by-day into a collective abyss — and then accomplish the large task of self-correction. You always think someone else does it better. You love those books about Japanese do this and Danish people that and France understands life and try some other way to be.

You are wrong about what it will look like to be a writer, by the way. You think it is all beautiful covers and beautiful stories and forgetting the rest of the world and if possible, a chance to be one of those JD Salingers with NO AUTHOR PHOTO. Instead, you will start getting author photos before you even write a book, and you had to learn how to look like the kind of person who looked like she might read this book, or like she might be likeable, or at least not a monster, or maybe smart, pretty but not too, and please choose correctly because this photo has to last the next 30 years. You had better recognize your prime. It takes you a while to get back to writing after your foray into Un-Americanness. You distract yourself with living abroad, and working in diplomacy, anywhere where you could don a mask and be good — forever good. You marry a man that is singular in this world that you meet at a German-language Summer camp. You birth a 9 lb. 3 oz. baby and you almost die, and then your next baby is even bigger.

“But what do I name them?” she asks.

“You can’t make those choices alone,” I say.

“Who is he?” she asks.

“He is everything,” I say.

“What does he look like?” she asks.

“He looks like his twin brother,” I say.

You write alongside your babies. You learn to pack more into naps. You never rest. You build yourself a public persona that is your charmingest, smarty-pantsest self and at home you are a rabid bear woman.

I’m so sorry that you come into your own as a writer just at a time when the value of the written and reported life will plummet. Really, it’s been happening the entire time you’ve been writing, but now you feel it existentially. I’m from 2025 and somehow I still have a job as a writer. It’s a real miracle, isn’t it? With bots spamming me on LinkedIn every day for $25/hour jobs to teach Artificial Intelligence to replace me?”

“What’s a bot?” she asks.

“It’s kinds of like a nightmare spider that uses every leg to gather the essence of what someone else created,” I say.

It will suck — you spend far too much time looking for ways to wedge yourself into this world of writers than actually attending to the life of a writer by, you know, writing and by, you know reading. You do it as people far more successful and moneyed than you write about magic and muses and give advice to never putting a dollar sign to your creativity. You report on obsessives, you will try food writing, wine writing, you do travel writing to the point that you hate travel. But then a series of unfortunate events and paired with terrible genetics you don’t even know about yet lands you stuck at home for five years, unable to sit, housebound with a pelvic nerve injury.”

“Elvis the pelvis?” you ask. “Like mom says?”

“Not even close,” I say.

“It’s a great story. You get stuck at home and then you learn the truth about houses. As if by magic, you get a job editing a design magazine of all things. You start to feel like you are your house. It’s going to be great inflection point, a perfect first plot point, as the movie people say — as long as you come through it, Emily. And you’re going to have to come through it. You think you could stay safe in the imagination, but what you need is for something to knock you flat on your ass in your own home so you can find something worth fighting for and something you have to say. You will take your complete energetic porousness and open yourself up to what you can learn from your own walls. You will make this world beautiful. Sometimes you will use it to control those around you. You will raise your children here, with everyone snuggled up at the counter because now you stand to eat (and so does your husband), and you will often wonder what other brokenness you could tolerate to be here, in your own kitchen, in this tiny world of your own creation.

You love Waldenbooks? Wait, no, it’s Borders you love? No, it’s the Penn State bookstore? No, it’s that weird place in Munich that pairs bottles of wines with literature? Is it Politics & Prose in DC, where Jonathan Safran Foer will stare at your chest and say he likes your shirt? No, it’s Prairie Lights, where you cultivate a perfect bookseller/reader friendship with Paul Ingram? Or is it Third Street Books, where the shelves say everything anyone might need to know about what you love in the small town where you will settle? You will build a life on a love of writing and then just two months before your book comes out, you will develop a vision condition that makes walking through settings with too much visual noise — like a bookstore — a migraine-in-the-making. Sorry. Stuff happens. Some bodies are softer. You are soft. That’s why everyone loves to hug you, why your childhood friend Katie always conjures you when she imagines what it will feel like when her mom dies.

Should we talk about the four boyfriends in a row that you ghosted? Should we talk about how one day, you will watch your sons moving through childhood and wish that you had not been so shy at their age and dared a few more things? Should I bring up how you still haven’t figured out how to behave in a group yet? What about that obsession with nuclear families and sitcom dads and your need to feel whole and complete and finished? Have we fixed that yet? You like to correct things. How will you self-correct?”

[eyes big]

“Sorry,” I say. “That’s a lot to put on a nine-year-old.”

“What’s coming?” she asks. “What should I know?”

“Don’t make out with Keith,” I say. “His girlfriend has mononucleosis.”

Anyway, I love you anyway, Emily. You’re a sweet kid, when you’re not judging everything around you or wishing it all was different. I love that you still Kool-Aid man your way back into my day whenever I am dreaming of a better life or, at the very least, better furniture. I love it when you make me drop everything and send me racing towards any bit of paper — girl! you are always be a terrible archivist! I love that you will never forget that when you are tapped in — really, connected to whatever grand energy is swirling around us, you will see images in your head before they become the thing and then you will make it.

Emily. Someday, you will be driving home from the grocery store and you will look above the horizon at one of those bulbous Oregon clouds — you can’t even imagine it! — and you have this fleeting feeling that you would do absolutely none of it differently. Having any different means you wouldn’t have this, whatever this is, now. None of it.”

P.S. Am I the only person who is this harsh with her inner child? I see these kids on TikTok being all: “Look how far we have come!” And I’m all like: “Girl, the world is a vampire!”

This week’s QUESTIONS NO ONE ASKED ME

📖How many books did you read during Spring Break?

I’ve been waiting ages (New Ages?) to get my hands on my copy of journalist Leah Sottile’s Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age. Leah is a journalism hero f mine, and she happens to have written kind of book I’d want to write if I were braver and had more time to travel. It’s basically a narrative of the kooky and dangerous women on the fringe who hold control in the New Age world of crystals (like) and aliens (meh). These are the folks who go all in on intuition and the individual’s power to feel the truth — an approach that sometimes leads to people eating a whole lot of colloidal silver and turning blue or going against the vaccine movement or basically just preying on people’s insecurities and frailties to build their empires. As someone who loves crystals and identifies as intellectual woo, it definitely read like a cautionary tale. Sottile connects the modern-day narrative of the leader of the modern-day Love Has Won movement/scam to a history of women claiming power by setting themselves up as prophets and seers. It’s a giant train wreck and I was IN IT. I also read Piranesi, the new Susanna Clarke, but it had no aliens and seems more like a thought experiment than a story.

🎥 Do you have an opinion on the whole Meghan Markle thing?

It’s complicated. I’ve watched 2/3 of the series and my deep admiration for her grew into rage that sat with me for days. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure out my feelings about things (no one else is going to!), but couldn’t quite put the words to it until I read the New York mag critique. It has something to do with there only being room in the culture for the same old people. Don’t you have enough, Meghan?

🎧 Wait, audiobooks count as reading, right?

If you’ve talked to me lately, you know that I’m moving into a planting seeds moment, but the garden seems too big. I needed some levity, and I’m finding it in Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. You might not need to read this book if you understand that the entire idea is in the title. Make everything a tiny experiment! So that’s what I’m doing. I started a screenplay yesterday. I’ve never written one before and don’t exactly know how, but I know what kind of stories I’d want to watch, so here I go! Tiny experiment!

🎨Have you finished anything lately? Anything at all?

Working on it. I am THISCLOSE to finishing this giant needlepoint project I started forever ago. I ran out of black thread right at the end and had to order more from Ehrman Tapestry. I had this big idea that I would do all six projects in the Days of Creation series, and haven’t even finished one! But I ordered the thread yesterday and I am going to finish it.

🏡 Have you decided on what house project to focus on this season?

I’m all in on changing our younger son’s former room into a den right now but am hung up on paint. I often wonder what would a TV show look like if it actually sat with the people as they created their house projects by hand? I think that would be what the Danish call SLOW TV and I’d watch it.

😦What are you doing differently?

Friends, I have been trying to get more comfortable with a young teenager’s growing need for independence, so we let my cross-country loving son run through the Hoyt Arboretum in Portland, Ore. during Spring Break while we walked the paths with our other son. We decided on the loop he would take together, and then he turned the wrong way and ran the whole way to the Portland Bird Alliance, deep in Forest Park! And his phone cut out! And my tracker had one of those maps that say he is within five miles of this one point in every direction! If this isn’t a metaphor for parenting then I don’t have one.

What I’m working on

We are in the thick of planning for the Terroir Creative Writing Festival, and spots are filling up! Last week one of the speakers bowed out, so I was scrambling a bit, but we are good now.

FUN MOMENT: Our festival ended up in writer Laura Stanfill’s new book: Imagine a Door, about sustaining and understanding the writing life. In case you didn’t know, for writers that are put off by big conferences, the Terroir Creative Festival is a great way to practice being a literary citizen!