This house painted by Hopper bears a remarkable resemblance to the house that inspired Dream House.
Just blown away by the skill, power and pathos of this young man's debut novel. Its pages took my breath away with their truth and beauty and ugliness, scared me to the point of nausea and made my heart ache enough to need to stop reading. But it was impossible to put down. From the review: "...he was compelled to write about (his protagonist's abuse) in specific, unsparing language — in part because he feels that violence against young women is too often treated as a plot point in literature, rather than as a way to understand a victim’s experience.
“It can feel exploitative, and there’s a tendency for hurt young women to be symbols in literature and not characters in themselves,” he said. “I didn’t want Turtle to be a poster child or a stock case, I wanted her to feel like her own person.”'
For those who enjoyed "An Alert, Well-Hydrated Artist in No Acute Distress." an update from Hadley on this 2017 Giving Tuesday.
Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, Sarah Broom writes about her family's determination not to let go of their demolished home: "...what has plagued me most is the unfinished business of it all. Why is my brother Carl still babysitting ruins, sitting on the empty plot where our childhood home used to be?"
Joyce Carol Oates: "A house: a structural arrangement of space, geometrically laid out to provide what are called rooms, these divided from one another by verticals and horizontals called walls, ceilings, floors. The house contains the home but is not identical with it. The house anticipates the home and will very likely survive it, reverting again simply to house when home (that is, life) departs. For only where there is life can there be home."
Janet Hunter reflects on how time and distance eventually brought her heart closer to her house of origin.
In our houses, we are at our most powerful and powerless. The late Nina Riggs meditates on shopping for a couch for a living room that, for her, has become a dying room.
"Homemaking", by Jamaica Kinkaid: "I love the house in which I live. Before I lived in it, before I was ever even inside it, before I knew anything about it, I loved it. I would drive by and see it sitting on its knoll, seeming far away (because I, we, did not own it then), mysterious in its brown shingles and red shutters, surrounded by the most undistinguished of evergreens (but I did not then know they were undistinguished), seeming humble. That is how it drew attention to itself—by seeming humble. I longed to live in this house."
Nora Ephron writes about "home" in The Big Apple: "Eventually, I began to have a recurring dream about the Apthorp—or, to be accurate, a recurring nightmare. I dreamed I had accidentally moved out of the building, realized it was the worst mistake of my life, and couldn’t get my lease back. I have had enough psychoanalysis to know not to take such dreams literally, but it’s nonetheless amazing to me that, when my unconscious mind searched for a symbol of what I would most hate to lose, it came up with my apartment."
In her gorgeous eulogy for her aunt, Jane Cashin Demers captures how, in our mind's eye, a person and her house can become one and the same.
