Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

You get to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?

One of my top ten favorite movies is Something’s Gotta Give (2003, Sony Pictures) starring Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton. When Diane Keaton passed away recently, my husband and I rewatched this movie in tribute to her distinguished acting career.

Rewatching this movie reminded me how much I love it. As a freelance writer, I particularly love that Keaton plays a very successful playwright. She is divorced from her husband who still directs the plays she writes. Their adult daughter is single and in and out of relationships, including a brief one with Harry, a much older music industry executive played by Nicholson.

Keaton thinks her love life is over and done with, even as her ex-husband is engaged to a beautiful doctor who is nearly the same age as his own daughter. The movie explores the aging process for women versus men, and more specifically, the loneliness some women experience in their personal life even when their professional life is soaring.

And soaring is exactly what Keaton’s character’s professional life is doing. She has a place in NYC, but the main setting of the movie is her magnificent home in the Hamptons, with her own stretch of beach right outside her door and down a short flight of steps, no doubt purchased with the proceeds of her very successful Broadway plays.

Due to a series of comic events, Keaton ends up being the caregiver for Nicholson who is recovering from a heart attack in her Hamptons beach home. Through this unwelcome diversion, she meets his doctor played by Keanu Reaves, a younger man who is smitten with Keaton. The juxtaposition of not one but two May-December romances in the film is very interesting, and one that only Keaton finds unsettling.

My favorite scene in the movie is when Keaton is knee-deep in the writing process of her current play, surely destined for Broadway, and she is in her enormous bedroom, seated at her massive desk, pecking away on her laptop, furiously writing dialogue, sobbing over her failed attempt at reigniting her love life. Her desk faces a bank of windows, open, with the sheer white curtains billowing in the night breeze coming off the Atlantic Ocean.

I mean, who couldn’t write a best-selling novel, a smash Broadway hit, or a Grammy-winning album, in that setting?

Growing up in southeast Louisiana, the Mississippi River was my “backyard” as my parents’ home was on the river side of Highway 23. I loved to climb up on the levee and sit there, watching the tugboats and ships go by, feeling the breeze from the river, even as I batted away mosquitos and horseflies. Not the Atlantic, but for me I’d gladly take a house overlooking the Mighty Mississippi with a place where I could write.

No matter what I write between now and when I can no longer write, no matter how many articles or essays I sell, regardless of whether I finish my novel or not, I’ll never — never — have a house in the Hamptons, with a writing area facing the Atlantic Ocean, and I probably won’t ever have one facing the Mississippi. But, oh boy, that would be my perfect writing space.