Home life

Home Life is at once a literary meditation on the meaning of home and a remembrance of the author's search for "my own haven, my own right place" in the world. Suzanne Fox draws a poignant, bittersweet portrait of the places she has called home - a Victorian house on the Atlantic seacoast, a cramped college dorm, a sunlit house in L.A., a Parisian garret, an apartment in Manhattan too small for two. Each chapter evokes the warmth of our rooms - entrance hall, kitchen, bedroom, child's room - and the rich human relationships they shelter. Fox describes the emblematic objects of her life, the empty chairs, hand-me-down quilts, writing desks, and double beds whose meanings amount to "a ridiculous monument to the unknowable human soul." She re-creates, with an eye for detail and nuance, the places she has lived; through these traditional places we see the arc of a nontraditional life. Rooms recall friends and lovers, fears of loneliness, and the joys of solitude as her writing impresses upon us the importance of home as the backdrop of our lives, the cradle of our memories.