On Downsizing: Paul Muldoon, Jean Hanff Korelitz, and the Fine Art of Simplifying the Everyday

Paul Muldoon and his partner, novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz, talk to the New York Times about their experience downsizing from a home in New Jersey to an apartment on the Upper West Side.

“Of course, coming from New Jersey and in my case from Ireland,” said Mr. Muldoon, 62, the poetry editor of The New Yorker and a professor at Princeton, “I hadn’t quite put two and two together that one needed money to buy an apartment.”

“It was an overwhelming and frustrating experience,” said Ms. Korelitz, 52, the author of “Admission,” which was recently made into a movie starring Tina Fey, and of the coming “You Should Have Known.” “Back in May, when we lost out on an apartment we liked enormously, I realized I had to stop looking at places to buy.”

Which is how the couple and the younger of their children, Asher 14, landed on the Upper West Side near Riverside Park in a gracious five-room rental with French doors and moldings. “We don’t have a view of the Hudson, but I don’t need a view,” Mr. Muldoon said. “We can see a bit of sky, and there’s sunlight.”

Living in a prewar building is a nice little perk, but not something that is setting the new occupants’ hearts aflutter. Their New Jersey residence had been prewar too — pre-Revolutionary War. [...]

More at NYT.