An Ode To Duvet Days
Some people like the lines between their work and rest brightly drawn. Not me: I’ve always thought of going to work as going to bed. In winter, especially, this is convenient; if set up properly, what is a bed if not the very puffiest of coats? These days, I live in one of America’s coldest places, Minneapolis, where the winter is its very wintriest. I work and write and hibernate in bed, a cosy habit I have cultivated since childhood.
My first office was a single bed. Four-poster, white and flowered, with a pink canopy, it had matching pink sheets and a quilt, and was surrounded by the pink wallpaper I chose at five and lived with until 18, long before I was published as VV, back when I was just called Sugi. The bed had a matching white desk, which I used for studying the subjects I didn’t mind, but also didn’t love. That work was often fuelled by candy. Food was not allowed in bed, unless you were sick. This was not my parents’ rule, but mine: bed was for books, and therefore sacred. No crumbs allowed.
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Because I preferred to read lying down, when I began to write, I also wrote lying down, propped up on my elbows and warm under the covers. On weekend mornings, when everyone else was still asleep, I exited my office, shivering, to retrieve an exercise book, before scurrying back to safety. If I got stuck in my story, I put my head down on the pillow and dozed – or not – and when I lifted it again, most of the time, the problem was solved, or had become more interesting in a way that allowed me to move forward. Harriet the Spy, meet Sugi the Napper. I recall the plot of one project: Frances Hodgson Burnett-lite, featuring an orphanage and a mysteriously missing rich grandfather, who presented himself at a convenient moment. I wished no greater fortune for the forlorn girls of my story than the cosiness I felt in that bed, which I poured into the plot.
Permitted to choose my own decor while I was in primary school in Bethesda, Maryland, I lived with my rosy choices for years. My friends commented enviously on the pink canopy and secretly, I agreed with them; I needed not a room of my own, but a cave. I read in bed, and wrote by hand, before we had a computer. The machine, which arrived when I was in middle school, got me up, which I could not resist but also resented; the keyboard allowed my words to move as fast as my head, but you couldn’t be horizontal and use a desktop. I still retreated to the bed to read printed-out drafts, cherished novels and history books.
Then I went away to university. At many American campuses, you get an extra-long bed, for which you have to buy special extra-long sheets. I imagined the tall people the bed would accommodate: the basketball players, the rowers. How would they have room for all their books? For me, of only average height, the extra length meant that I had space for extra-long work. Plus – magical moment – I got a clunker of a laptop, which meant typing in bed. My brain tucked itself back under the blankets and huddled against the Massachusetts cold. I began my first novel in that spot, in my second year at Harvard, stacks of paper drifting around me.
I slept in single beds in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Iowa, where I started a second novel, until I moved to New Hampshire as the writer in residence at a school that gave me an apartment. Asked what furnishings I wanted, I elected two beds, one double in the bedroom and one single in the living room. I travelled from one to the other depending on the mood and the project. One novel liked one bed; one novel preferred the other. Like many places in New England, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire did not turn the heat on until a certain date. Shivering once more, I remembered how Laura Ingalls Wilder, and protagonists of children’s books, had made hot-water jars to keep their feet warm in bed. I made one and wrote, as snowstorms dumped piles outside.
When I moved to New York in 2006, to study arts journalism at Columbia, I took over a room in a three-person duplex apartment. To enter my doorless basement lair, I descended a curtained spiral staircase. ‘Someday you are going to fall down that drunk,’ a pal said, looking at it dubiously. I am clumsy enough that even without alcohol, the idea alarmed me, but somehow, in three years of living there, I never did. Had I fallen, I could have face-planted almost directly on the king bed I had bought from the previous occupant, which took up most of the real estate. There was no prospect of a desk, but who cared? A king bed was appropriately palatial, even better than an extra-long one. The first novel, to which I had returned, was in the wrong order. I printed it out in its entirety, cut it up, and rearranged it all on the bed. I stood over it, staring, worrying, moving pieces around. The novel, restless, tossed and turned until it found the right position. Then, properly sorted,
it got out of bed, and I handed it over to my editor, a beloved friend who confirmed that it now had a structure.
By the time I moved to the Midwest to teach at the University of Michigan in 2009, the idea of the bed as a refuge against the cold and the dark, as a home for the best work I could do, was firmly ingrained. The weather was often freezing, and I gloried in the days when
I had a 45-degree commute. (I mean the angle and not the temperature.) My apartment in Michigan – in a building that had formerly been a boarding school for young ladies from Manhattan – blazed with cheerful colours, which the prior tenant had painted as a stay against the grey Michigan sky. Once again, some of the walls were pink. After the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, I spent many nights sitting up in bed in that apartment, corresponding with people across the world who shared my interest in that country’s history and politics. I had always worked in bed, but I had also slept; here, anxious to learn as much as I could, I grew increasingly insomniac to keep up the exchanges.
In Minneapolis, where I moved in 2015, my bed has continued to provide a refuge from which to see an increasingly fractious world. If trying to sleep doesn’t work, there is a computer, or a book, a heater humming beside me. In the early days of the pandemic, following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, the city came alive with protests, and those who sought to suppress them, as well as provocateurs from elsewhere. As I am
immunocompromised, I stayed inside, frustrated, as loved ones and comrades went to join the protests. By then, old hand injuries had also resurfaced. I was struggling to type and began using voice recognition. As the rest of my family navigated the strange new world, I sat alone in my bed, telling my computer the story of my second novel, Brotherless
Night.
I paused only to watch Unicorn Riot, an alternative news site that streamed video, and to talk to others about what was happening in Minneapolis. As the uprisings unfolded outside, inside, I was reciting a version of the brutal violence of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms in Sri Lanka. As I tried to finish one story and learn the other, I burrowed into the comforts of my familiar workspace.
I still turn to bed for space and comfort. The history of my beds is also a history of my work. It doesn’t need to look like work to anyone else and, in fact, it probably doesn’t; the uniform changes only from pyjamas to tracksuits, and nothing formal is required but the sentences and the books. I didn’t think my bed could get better, but a few years ago, I bought a new king bed, the kind that bends to support you, that will lift your head or put your legs in a position equivalent to zero gravity. I had been my own ergonomic desk for so long that discovering a bed that would embrace me, that would make itself around me, felt like magic – the kind of magic that makes my writing possible. The world is big, but so is my bed, and as long as I can work in one, I can face the other.
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