Bailey Merlin

Novelist as palimpsest ✨

Many of the writers that I know well tell me that writing is a form of therapy. While I certainly tell others to use journaling as a way to unpack complex feelings, I've always used fiction as a way to process my emotions. When I was writing A Lot of People Live in This House, we were just at the beginning of the pandemic. Life didn't feel real.

As a way to ground, I started writing this story about a woman moving into a communal living situation just as a pandemic shut down the world. I wanted to see how it would feel to move into a house like mine without any prior knowledge, but with the added twist of the main character being someone who REALLY didn't want to move in with a bunch of strangers.

There are scenes in the book lifted right out of actual events in our house, including a diabolical screening of the Cats movie, a home version of Chopped (the cooking competition show), and musicians practicing in the house. By writing about these weird, special moments, I was able to reflect on how special my circumstances were.

Now that the book has been out for over a year, I get to hear how those scenes impacted others, and it always makes me smile. When I go to book events, it's funny how a certain scene will pull me right back to the moment I wrote it.

Writers, how much of yourself do you leave on the page?