Travel writer and author Louise Southerden takes readers on a roller coaster of deep searching, learning, loving and growing, as she plans, navigates and quite literally builds a new life as her relationship breaks down.
Purposefully changing the trajectory of your life and career after a few decades doing what you love and know so well is a challenging thing to do. Planning and building your own tiny home with no previous building experience is a very brave thing to do.
Laying out your thoughts, dreams, fears and the messiness and loveliness of your personal and business life bare on the pages of a book for the world to read, is something many of us would not have the guts to do.
I’m so glad that’s what travel writer and author Louise Southerdon does in her memoir TINY, because it’s a tonic for many of us facing the curve balls that the universe flings at us, as we try to make our way through life.
Not only it is a eloquently written book that’s hard to put down, it’s filled with really big questions. Am I supposed to be here, doing what I am doing? Did I take a wrong path, and am I being true to myself? Am I doing the best I can be doing? And the really big ones: what is the point of life and do I need a house and someone else to get through it?
As Louise has always been a free spirit travelling the world as a writer without a solid home base, this is a question that she continually faces, and to add more complexity to the mix, she is building her tiny home with a builder who is also her partner.
As their relationship deteriorates, Louise finds the strength to search for her own truth, and not return to, and rely on their bond, which repeatedly hurts them both.
Although Louise’s book is about building a tiny home and finding a secure place in the world, it’s also a no holds barred journey into understanding her relationships with nature, other people, and herself.
By building her tiny home – one thoughtful piece at a time – she learns more about the world, herself, and what might make her happy. Building a home is also stripped back to what it is – a means of providing someone shelter in the world. A place to be ourselves.
Here Louise shares some of her thoughts, from where she is now living in her tiny home, in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales.
Were you worried about being so honest when writing and publishing the book?
Even before we finished the build, I knew I had to write about it, to process everything that happened and make sense of it. However, I didn’t realise it would require me to be so naked, in print, until I was so far into it there was no turning back. I was also reading a lot of memoirs, and the best ones I read were brave and raw so that normalised what I was doing. I was nervous at first about being so open, particularly about the relationship that ran alongside the build, while living in a small town, but I did my best to be respectful to everyone I wrote about and I just had to tell my story and be true to that and that sustained me through the two and a half years of writing Tiny.
How did the experience impact on the rest of your life?
It’s inevitable that the build and the book would have a huge impact on my life: they were both big projects, with a lot at stake, and together they took up almost four years of my life. I definitely feel changed in ways I’m still trying to understand. I believe in myself more now, and I learned a lot about relationships, particularly toxic ones. Writing about the build was possibly the bigger learning experience, because it was a chance to look more closely at what happened and it was more difficult than the build in many ways. I think I’m going to be noticing the impacts of this time in my life for many years to come.
What has it been like living in your new home? Was it all you dreamed it to be?
After more than four years of tiny living, I can honestly say I love it now more than ever,
particularly since I moved to a new, more spacious site eight months ago, away from where we did the build. I still have to rent land, but just having a home of my own has given me a deep sense of security. There’s also something about living in a home you’ve designed to fit your life. I can’t imagine living any other way now.
To read about a new cookbook focusing on healthy family recipes, click here.
