John Blesso

Late in 2002, I was hit with my own perfect storm. I lost my child-care job just as I could no longer makes sense of the novel for which I had devoted the previous seven years of my life.

So there I was: A thirty-one-year old unemployed male nanny who had pissed away his career-building years on a novel that he no longer understood. Meanwhile, the NeoCons had begun whipping up their mushroom-cloud hysteria to invade Iraq. My life had become rudderless right when our country was gearing up to destabilize a whole region and trash our standing in the world. Let's just say that this wasn't the most chipper time for me and I promptly settled into a cozy little funk. A malaise, if you will.

I knew that what I needed more than anything was to work, only the Dow had dipped back down to 7,000, and all of the resumes and cover letter I blasted out into the ether would have done just as well to have been corked up in a bottle and tossed into the East River. I began doing some freelance editing, bartending, focus-grouping, working whatever jobs I could to keep busy. By the spring of 2003, I had decided to make the most of my flexible schedule and to join a beach sharehouse.

Kismet and Fire Island--as is the case with many people who visit for the first time--blew me away. I loved the wild green growth of the dunes and the white-sand beach, as well as Kismet's working-class and bohemian crowd spilling willy-nilly from weathered houses. Kismet was everything I wanted in beach community.

One thing I did have going for me was that I had bought and renovated a beat-up one-bedroom condo in rapidly gentrifying West Harlem. With my nice little pile of equity growing by the day, I decided to buy and run my own sharehouse in Kismet. While I had no desire to return to my novel, I began writing about some of the funnier experiences during my renovations, just to maintain my writing discipline. Only these cuts were soon eclipsed by my writing about the funny things that were happening with the people in the house. These stories ultimately morphed into Sharehouse Confidential.