Object Threads
Stones and secretary desks
AN INTRODUCTION
Summer is the wrong season to seek consistency. It is long days and tan lines and salad dinner and sandy feet and sitting in the traffic of I-95 and washing sugar off my fingertips after mixing it with cut strawberries. This frenetic energy is not my comfort zone, but it is good for shaking me toward all things NEW. Come fall I’ll bring some of those fresh ideas into rotation, but this month let’s return to my quote archive not for a history lesson but for something a bit looser. Here’s a passage from Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin to start things off:
TEXT: SCAFFOLDING
“In fidelity there are never two of you alone together.
And we sit at tables, and we lie in beds, and we dream our futures, and all the while, there are threads of other dreams woven in, a beach you visited with someone else, the name which you’d like for a girl but it happens to be the name of a girl from school she detested, the part of town you’d like to move to where years ago you kissed another girl at a party, you make all your plans and build all your projects but how many of them are yours, and how many of them are fragments of someone else’s life?”
—Lauren Elkin, Scaffolding
There is a line of stones in our living room placed carefully across the top of an open shelf. Maybe my husband and I found all of them together—on the beaches of Maine or Vancouver Island, the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Or maybe the collection is a mix of those stones and the ones I was gifted by friends. Each of them weighted with the hazy memory of whose palm first plucked it from the ground.
Eight years into our relationship and the space we share is filled less with the fragments Elkin is referencing than it used to be. There are the stones, of course, but they’ve largely lost their provenance. We have cycled through many of the larger more furniture-shaped-fragments, and those left are mostly the ones whose threads we want to live with: my Nana’s secretary desk as my own writing surface, for example. What did she store in the compartment where I keep my pens? What about that secretive one toward the back? I think about her perfect cursive sometimes when I write in a notebook, lazy script blurring into linear scratches and memories of afternoons practicing the piano under her tutelage.
Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding tells the story of two couples living in the same Paris apartment fifty years apart. Underneath the character’s shared interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis, it’s a novel about how homes, and the objects within them, hold space for memory. I liked it. You might, too.
IMAGE: THE DESK
My inherited secretary desk was coated in a red stain which theoretically seemed so easy to remove. My friend agreed to help me strip it and thus began a task more arduous than either one of us was prepared for. After many rounds of sanding, the stain is mostly lifted. But even now if the desk comes into contact with any water, beads of red dye lift from the grain. I take it as a reminder that both nothing is perfect and the past is always present.
ON MY MIND: IN AN OPEN TAB OR A TOTE BAG
The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch / Set in a mystical castle where everyone is in love with everyone or maybe they are all in lust with God? It should be adapted into a screenplay and then a film directed by Celine Sciamma.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys / A postmodern novel where Rhys writes the story of Charlotte Brontë’s madwoman in the attic from Jane Eyre. Get the version with Edwidge Danticat’s introduction.
In Paris, In Tokyo, In Prague, I stumble out, Insane with Coffee by Ed Park / An excerpt from Park’s memoir, Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties, which was lost on a floppy disk until he discovered it printed in a manila folder. Coming out August 11!
LUMA Atelier Printemps 2026 pamphlet—the whole foundation in Arles, France is a perfect experience, but Camille Henrot’s film In the Veins was what left the most lasting impression on me during my visit earlier this month.
Interview with Camille Henrot by Estelle Hoy, Apartmento / The writer Estelle Hoy stays in Henrot’s apartment and talks with her mostly about her art practice but also about the space itself.
Read more about artists’ Camille Henrot and Mauro Hertog’s apartment on Elle Decor. Completed in collaboration with the firm Husband Wife.
