Chapter 6 Summary: An Open Love Letter to Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.
Summary
Jessi Klein opens with a mock-confessional declaration of love for Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent, two interior-design celebrities she has never met. She traces her infatuation back to Nate’s appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where his “swallowing ice cream” voice and small-space makeovers—like draping beads over a mirror—offered her a vision of gracious domesticity. When Nate married the younger, handsomely curated Jeremiah, Klein felt a sting of betrayal and suspicion: Jeremiah’s perfect fedoras, stacked gold bracelets, and reality-TV origin story on The Rachel Zoe Project made her fear he was a social climber.
Her skepticism melts while watching their series Nate & Jeremiah by Design. The couple’s physical and emotional intimacy—arms slung over shoulders, adoring gazes—convinces Klein that their love is genuine. She develops a particular affinity for Jeremiah’s mischievous compassion. Their renovation magic, turning ugly bathrooms into oases with claw-foot tubs and succulents, feeds her hunger for order and beauty. At the same time, Klein confesses a chronic homesickness she has felt since childhood, a sense of being in the wrong place. She latches onto the Irish word coim—pleasing, pleasant—to name what she lacks amid toddler chaos and marital strain.
The chapter reaches a crisis when Nate and Jeremiah announce on their show that they are moving back to New York because Jeremiah misses the city. Klein is shocked and feels personally abandoned. After obsessively viewing their new West Village town house in Architectural Digest, she reinterprets her anger as jealousy: Jeremiah, too, had been homesick, and Nate had answered his call. Their partnership, she realizes, is the very embodiment of coim, and her fixation was a projection of her own longing for a place where she could feel held.
Key Events
- Klein describes her earliest exposure to Nate Berkus through Oprah and her immediate crush on his looks and voice.
- She voices suspicion toward Jeremiah, citing his polished appearance, age difference, and reality-show origins.
- Watching Nate & Jeremiah by Design transforms her opinion; she catalogs specific details of their affectionate body language and design choices.
- Klein connects her obsession to a lifelong pattern of homesickness, which intensifies in the disarray of new motherhood and a strained marriage.
- Nate and Jeremiah reveal on-screen that they are leaving Los Angeles for New York—prompted by Jeremiah’s homesickness.
- Klein studies their Architectural Digest home spread, then reframes her feeling of betrayal as envy of their ability to answer each other’s emotional needs.
Character Development
Jessi Klein presents herself as both fangirl and self-aware critic. Her emotional arc moves from superficial celebrity worship to a deeper insight: she envies not the couple’s wealth but the emotional attunement that allows them to create home wherever they are. Her admission of homesickness and marital friction adds vulnerability, moving the chapter beyond comedy into an exploration of unfulfilled longing.
Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent function less as fully drawn characters and more as a two-headed symbol. However, Klein sketches each distinctly: Nate as the “dream gay husband” with a warm, reassuring presence; Jeremiah as the initially suspect but ultimately more emotionally relatable partner. The critical turn is Jeremiah’s confessed homesickness, which reconfigures him from a potential gold-digger into a fellow traveler in search of coim.
Themes, Symbols, or Motifs
Homesickness and coim: The chapter’s central motif is the Irish word coim—a state of ease, comfort, and belonging. Klein treats it as the emotional opposite of the bathroom floor she wipes after a toddler’s accident. Homesickness is not about a physical dwelling but about the absence of coim in her marriage, her mothering, and her own skin.
Parasocial intimacy: Klein’s relationship with Nate and Jeremiah is entirely mediated through television and social media, yet it provides genuine comfort. Her sense of betrayal when they move underscores how real the emotional investment can be even in a one-way connection.
The idealized home: Every renovation detail—a Spanish chandelier, a kilim rug, a succulent on a toilet tank—becomes a small icon of order. Klein contrasts these curated spaces with her own “swirl of plastic toys and really ugly beeping things.” Nate and Jeremiah’s home represents a fantasy of control that parenting has stolen from her.
Transformation through recognition: The moment Klein hears Jeremiah’s own homesickness, envy transforms into solidarity. The chapter argues that even the people who seem to have mastered coim are navigating the same ache for place and peace.
Why This Chapter Matters
“An Open Love Letter to Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent” deepens the memoir’s through line about the destabilizing force of motherhood. Klein uses the language of design and celebrity to articulate an emotional state—homesickness—that she cannot fix simply by moving houses. The chapter demonstrates humor as a coping mechanism while refusing to trivialize the longing beneath it. By the end, Klein has not achieved coim; instead, she has reframed her fixation as a compass pointing toward what she wants: a partnership that answers the call when someone says, “I need to go home.” The chapter also serves as a bridge between earlier essays about the raw early years of parenting and later reflections on finding footing in a new phase of life.
Study Questions and Answers
Q: What does the word coim represent in this chapter, and why does Klein fixate on it?
A: Coim, an Irish word meaning pleasing or pleasant, stands for the elusive sense of peace, calm, and belonging that Klein craves. She cannot find it in the chaos of parenting or the friction in her marriage, so she projects it onto Nate and Jeremiah’s harmonious relationship and impeccably styled homes. The word becomes a shorthand for everything her current life lacks.
Q: How does Klein’s opinion of Jeremiah Brent change over the course of the chapter?
A: Initially, she is suspicious of Jeremiah, viewing his youth, good looks, and reality-TV past as signs he might be exploiting Nate’s fame. Her view shifts when she watches their design show and witnesses their genuine affection. The pivotal moment comes when she learns that Jeremiah himself experiences deep homesickness—this makes him relatable rather than threatening, and Klein redirects her jealousy into empathy.
Q: Why does Klein feel personally betrayed when Nate and Jeremiah announce their move to New York?
A: Klein had taken emotional refuge in the fantasy that they all shared a city, even if she didn’t particularly like Los Angeles. Their departure felt like an abandonment that mirrored the loneliness she already struggled with. Later, she realizes that her anger was rooted in envy: Jeremiah had the homesickness she felt, but he also had a partner who would uproot their life to make him feel at home again. The betrayal was really about her own unmet need for someone to pick her up.