Olivia Thirlby just made the big move. After 22 years in Manhattan, she's crossed the bridge to Brooklyn. "It was a big deal for me, but I absolutely love it," says Thirlby. "It's just so fucking nice to go home to a place that's not crowded." Twice as big as her old West Village digs, Thirlby says her new Brooklyn apartment has, as the Craigslist ad might read: "Tons of natural light!" with three windows in each room (including the bathroom) and a porch she plans to turn into her own little "Garden of Eden" this spring.
It's one of those bitter-cold, mid-winter days when I meet Thirlby for lunch at Epistrophy, a white brick-walled café in Nolita. She's wearing white Ray-Bans, a grey V-neck sweater, skinny jeans, a pale gold shimmery scarf (a nice contrast to her mass of deep brown hair) and patterned socks tucked into vintage Joan & David flats. She could easily be the girl sitting next to you waiting for the L at the Bedford stop in Wiliamsburg, and in fact, Thirlby grew up not too far away in Alphabet City during the mid-'80s, before the East Village was a brunch and bar-hopping destination. "The only people there were drug dealers, squatters, and us," she says of her old neighborhood, where she ate Joselito's rice and beans daily and uptown parents were afraid to let their children travel for a play date.
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