Meet Arianne Cohen, author of the
book Help,
It’s Broken! A Fix-It Bible for the Repair-Impaired.
AskaNewYorker: I am just trying to remember how we connected.
Arianne: I think I emailed you. I looked at AskaNewYorker.com when I was first
moving to New York. I saw the website way back when and I knew I was doing a
New York book.
AskaNewYorker: What have you done today?
Arianne: I installed hooks into my wall, which is big. I talked with editors
from various magazines and I talked to my agent. I also updated my
website.
AskaNewYorker: Tell us about your apartment.
Arianne: I just got my apartment in February 2005. So, it’s not brand,
brand new. I am renovating and fixing it up a bit.
AskaNewYorker: How did you find your apartment?
Arianne: I got it myself. I did a speed search. I searched for ten days straight
and I looked at about 50 apartments, and then found one that I liked. I knew
a lot of people who spent years looking for apartments, which seemed kind of
miserable.
AskaNewYorker: Owner or renter?
Arianne: I bought on the Upper East Side, somewhere between Upper East Side
and Midtown, actually, sort of in that no-man’s land.
AskaNewYorker: So you bought your apartment and you wrote a book called Help,
It’s Broken! A Fix-It Bible for the Repair-Impaired. Tell us about it.
Arianne: Yes, I did. It is particularly great for apartment dwellers. It deals
with everything you would have to deal with as an apartment dweller, and nothing
outside of that. We’re not talking about how to fix your roof, we’re
not talking about how to manicure your lawn, we are talking about your messy
neighbor with the rodent problem or what you do when the water heater is outside
your apartment and you have no hot water and how you deal with that situation.
AskaNewYorker: I have a mouse, who I call Jordan. We see him on occasion. Also,
my sister-in-law was forced from her apartment due to bed bugs. Any advice?
Arianne: Your apartment only needs to be more sanitary than the one next door.
So lots of old apartment buildings, they have roaches that live in the walls.
They also have occasional mice. It’s old, so they have communities of
mice and cockroaches that have been around for generations at this point. Very
often you have neighbors who are dirty and leave pizza out and just aren’t
clean. No roach is going to come to your apartment if there’s no food
there. They’re going to go next door or to the guy’s upstairs or
somewhere else. So your job is to be cleaner than your neighbors. Then you’ll
be OK, for the most part.
AskaNewYorker: Do you know the names of all the tools in a hardware store?
Arianne: I do. And what’s interesting about tools is once you start learning
the names of them, you know what the other tools do. There’s a language
there, and once you know “eye” means a little hole, you understand
that any time the word “eye” comes up, it means the same thing.
AskaNewYorker: What’s a miter saw?
Arianne: I have no idea. If it doesn’t come up in basic fixing, you probably
don’t need to know what it is. Also, another important thing in the book
is that you don’t need to know what things are called. You only need to
know how to use them. There’s all kinds of different fascinating vocabulary
that fix-it people like to use. They talk about joust and they use the word
flush…that means aligned.
AskaNewYorker: Where did you grow up?
Arianne: I grew up in upstate New York. Far, far upstate. We’re not talking
Westchester, we’re talking about cow country above Albany.
AskaNewYorker: Then you migrated south?
Arianne: I went to college in Boston, then I went to Cambodia for a year, where
I worked for a newspaper. I learned all kinds of fantastic home skills. I know
how to build a Cambodian mud hut, which comes in very handy on the Upper East
Side, I can tell you.
AskaNewYorker: Did you have any problems acclimating to the food in the Far
East?
Arianne: I’m actually allergic to peanuts, so traveling to Asia was perhaps
the worst place for that. I ate very, very carefully for a year. But I learned
how to say “are there any peanuts in this” in four different languages:
Cambodian, Thai, Laotian, and Vietnamese.
AskaNewYorker: I’ve read you’re a swimmer.
Arianne: I used to be a competitive swimmer for 15 years. I’m very tall,
6 foot 3 inches, so I’m a good swimmer. But, I’ve since dried off,
and there are very few good pools in New York, and they’re hard to find.
I don’t happen to live right near one of them.
AskaNewYorker: What was your favorite stroke?
Arianne: I did the breast stroke. I was a breast stroker and I swam the 200
breast stroke.
AskaNewYorker: So, what’s next for you? Can we get the inside scoop on
your new super secret book project?
Arianne: Well, Kennedy, we’re still dealing with this book. We’ll
move on to the next one in six months or so.
AskaNewYorker: Well, be sure to tell us all about it when the time is right.
Thanks for talking with us, and have a happy new year!
