Introduction

Gillian Hanson is a woman interrupted. Like thousands of Katrina survivors, she lost everything when the storm hit New Orleans more than a year ago. After shuttling between friends’ far-flung homes, then spending a semester at Harvard, she returned to New Orleans, only to find that the graduate program in biomedical ethics she had enrolled in at Tulane University was canceled.

Today Hanson, 24, is trying to get her life back on track. She has a new rental apartment (her old one, severely damaged by flooding, was occupied by squatters) and a job as a wine steward at a French Quarter restaurant. She hopes to go to graduate school eventually.

She moved into the apartment with little more than the items she had carried with her as she fled the city in a friend’s van: two changes of clothes and 11 books. “I thought it was going to be a few days with nothing to do,” she says.

In the following months, she collected more books and a few pieces of furniture from the street. Still, she returns from her job at 2 a.m. to a practically bare apartment. “It’s a reminder that everything in my life is still in flux,” she says. “I don’t feel anchored, and I don’t know how I’ll proceed from here.”

What follows is Real Simple’s effort to help Hanson regroup and move on, by creating a place where she can feel at home while she plans the next chapter of her life. “I would like my apartment to be a reflection of who I am,” she says. More important, perhaps, “I would like to feel that I’m in stable surroundings.”