Annie Guest is the author of the new book Design For Your Mind: How a Family Caregiver and Mental Health Therapist Renovated Her Home to Recharge Her Life--and Didn't Break the Bank. She has worked in book publishing, advertising, and law, and as a mental health therapist.
Q: What inspired you to write Design for Your Mind, and how was the book’s title chosen?
A: I had been caring for my parents as they got older and became ill. Many of us know from experience that family caregiving is hard and that, for all its rewards, the work can drain us over time and challenge our zest for life.
This is a story about how I drifted from the self I knew and finally came up with a way to turn things around. After my parents passed away, I decided to tap into my passion for interior design and use what I understood as a mental health therapist to renovate my home in ways that would help me find my spark again.
I wanted to jump start the reconnection to my focus and creativity. I also needed to throw myself into creative work to grieve my parents’ passing and make sense of their final years.
One reason I became a therapist was that I have a passion for supporting human potential and helping clients learn to empower themselves. Wasted human potential often means needless suffering, and I think they’re both tragedies.
I wanted to help streamline the process of recharging after family caregiving to maybe spare other people some unnecessary struggles and wasted time and effort so they could get on with their own lives and pursue their own goals. There are many people in the caregiver boat.
I chose the title because the subject of the book is design to benefit the mind.
Coming up with the subtitle was more challenging. I wanted to touch on all the elements of the book that lent it value: family caregiver, mental health therapist, renovation, recharging a life, and to show that it can be done by regular people who aren’t planning to throw money at an expensive and disruptive remodeling project.
Q: How did you choose the photographs to include in the book?
A: Fortunately, long before I hatched the idea to write the book, I had taken copious photos of the rooms and the exterior of the house and uploaded them onto the Benjamin Moore website to help me choose paint colors.
When I finally had the idea to write the book, I had all the “before” pictures I needed. The “after” pictures were a moving target: I was constantly making improvements to the rooms as I wrote the book. That meant that I took, and retook, and re-retook, “after” photos every time I made a change to the room.
I wanted to use “before” and “after” photos lavishly throughout the book. I love looking at “before” and “after” photos myself, no matter what the subject is. It’s probably because I find all processes of transformation to be magical. So the book includes over 95 color photos.
Q: The author Gina Leatherman said of the book, “The reader can literally feel the grand old house shake off its lingering sadness and become a sanctuary of hope, renewal, and positive energies.” What do you think of that description?
A: I think Gina’s description captures the power of the house’s transformation on my own renewal. As I brought color and light into the house and cleared out the clutter, I gradually found myself feeling a lightness and a sense of well-being and vitality when I walked into its rooms. I could breathe freely again.
And I noticed that when friends came over, they mentioned feeling that same lightness and sense of well-being.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: Writing the book helped set me free. It memorialized the process of transforming the house, and it also captured my work to reacquaint myself with memories I still needed to understand.
But most important to me is the feedback I’ve received from other family caregivers who tell me they feel as if I wrote the book just for them. I wanted readers to feel seen and heard and respected and that reading the book was a pleasure.
Typeface, font size, margin size, layout, paper stock, and recommendations for resources were all chosen to serve the reader, particularly readers who are tired after a long day and don’t want to squint to read tiny typeface scrunched between the currently fashionable three-inch margins.
Essentially, I wrote a book that I wish I had found when I needed it myself.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m toying with ideas for a short story about some of the tech bros I knew in college decades ago and what I foresaw then as their eventual ascendancy over matters essential to our survival.
I actually used these guys as material for a standup comedy sketch I performed 30 years ago. They were my friends, and we hung out together. They had a particular way of seeing themselves in relationship to other people and the world.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Design For Your Mind is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and bookshop.org/shop/annieguestbooks. The Limited Edition is available exclusively at www.annieguestdesignforyourmind.com
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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