I made a magazine, again.
Meet Love and Other Rugs, Volume 2
Today, today right now, the second print volume of Love and Other Rugs is available for purchase. 52-pages of essays from this season, travel guides, and shopping recs with a double-sided poster as the centerfold. Two of the essays—On Floors, which is all about my love for fraternity basements, and Drinking & Other Drugs, a guest essay by Eliza Dumais—have not yet been published on the internet.
You can buy the issue HERE and starting next week, IRL at stores in NYC, LA and Austin. If you’ve loved L&OR over the years, I hope you’ll support this endeavor. Not to mention, it really is a beaut (not just because I put myself on the cover.) Please enjoy the volume’s foreward below..
A foreward
I’m writing this from my gray sofa (I know, I know) looking out onto my living and dining room where currently, there are no rugs, the art has been removed from the walls, and there is a big gap where a desk will eventually go. You see, I am in a state where, despite my better judgement, I am redoing my apartment (again). This happens almost cyclically—when I’m bored, when I’m uninspired, or when I’m not in love.
The latter, which has been true for quite some time, is most salient in a landscape where almost everyone I know seems to have found their person. Not for lack of trying to be in love—I find myself waiting in some mythical line the universe has put us all in. One where chance is the way we find humans, where one woman's ex could be yours just like someone’s couch could be too. Season 2 of Love and Other Rugs brought more rearranging both in my brain and in my floor plan—bolder hues on the walls, statement shelves anchoring my living room, and a certain decluttering that relegated my second dining table and a variety of my mother’s possessions to a storage unit up the road.
It was the first year of my whole life that I was working and traveling on my own terms. I thought maybe all the free time would bring me romance but instead it brought me closer to finding the space for what I really want to do—to write. This quote from my issue, On Home felt emblematic of that, which I wrote after a trip with my best friend to Paris—I drank too much wine, I bought a leather blazer and a sequin gown, and began to feel a bit like myself again.
In ways this print issue is emblematic of that desire to write too. Giving the words I’ve written a home beyond the internet—a physical space that they (and I) crave.
Many thanks to Eliza Dumais, my editor, Hemza Hajyousif, who designed the pages you’ll read, Daniela Spector for my portraits and Meghan McNeer for capturing my home. Also special shout out to Jessica and Leo from RenewFinds where we shot this issue.
Not to mention the countless subscribers, friends, and suitors who without their support Love and Other Rugs would not be possible.
brilliant
Love this! Just purchased. Congrats Lily! _Adam