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‘T“There’s no place like home,” says Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz, as she leaves the beautiful Emerald City of Aunt Em’s farmhouse, Kansas. Finally, we’ve left it behind.
As I work on my second book, Natural Disaster, I’m periodically plagued with the challenges that can come with putting home life front and center. The story unfolds over the course of 24 hours, following a mother who plans to spend her last day of maternity leave spending quality time with her two young boys (spoiler: it doesn’t go to plan).
Why – I asked myself – does a writer who has small children, who works from home, spend the few hours he has to write a place that he is trying not to find for the same few hours? Why, then, would readers choose to spend their precious free time ruining everyday life, when one of the selling points of fiction is its ability to help you escape or transcend reality? And yet, what could be more compelling? Home is where we live most of our lives: it is the place where our most intimate relationships are formed as children, and the arena where the oldest behaviors are played out in later years.
For writers, especially women, however, writing about domesticity offers a more difficult prospect: publicizing the personal is always interpreted as political, if not controversial.
In 2001, Rachel Cusk was widely criticized for her writing A Life’s Work, which a few months after its publication “sad, continuous“Telling the truth about his experiences in his childhood, he saw that he “did violence” to his family. His 2012 essay, Later, describing the end of his marriage, was not so controversial: he found the difference between his life and the book was “completely crushed”, with its broadcast on the radio and its publication on the radio.
Fiction, where the emotional truth is more familiar, can offer a way to forgive. Elizabeth Jane Howard’s five-volume saga The Cazalet Chronicles, though based on the Howard family, inspires adoration in its readers rather than outrage. It certainly helped that (unlike Cusk) Howard was writing 50 years after the first novel was set, effectively removing the heat of its inspiration.
One of the most interesting aspects of these books is Howard’s interest in the stability of the past. Tessa Hadley said that prose sometimes “it reads like a hymn to house managers“, and taken together, the whole project can be known as a domestic epic, where the endurance of the Home Place (the place called Cazalet family residence) and its music over the years provide eternal comfort against the external challenges.
You love the good, published earlier this year, Yvvette Edwards also uses time to do household chores. Beginning on the deathbed of its protagonist Ellen, Edwards’ story spools back through the years to the beginning of Ellen’s married life.
This new approach vividly reveals how ideas, roles and expectations change (and don’t change) throughout the generations: the result is like stripping the walls of an old house, every wallpaper is a testament to its age.
But the past has charms that are hard to find today. What would another book about modern domestic life add to our knowledge? If familiarity breeds contempt, what could be more familiar than the house, with its sisyphean routines and demands?
In his 2019 Booker short Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann he takes these questions and runs an ultramarathon with them. Ellmann’s heroine, a housewife in Ohio, runs a one-woman pie-making business from her kitchen, which allows her unlimited time to watch, read and think about everything from Donald Trump to her mother’s death and the puzzling refusal of an ice lolly to rot.
With over 1,000 pages, Ducks, Newburyport serves as another household companion: Mrs Beeton’s Handbook of Household Management. In writing such a bold work (almost every paragraph begins with “the truth”), Ellmann transforms domestic situations into intelligent, bold ones: the woman pours the cake on the cherry pies and at the same time struggles with her existence in light and shadow.
It can be said that the main problem of fiction has been “how can a person live?”, but in recent years, global instability, the threat of environmental degradation and technological change have led to the problem of how to create and maintain a good life among them. all this very direct in purpose.
In Vincenzo Latronico’s 2025 hit Perfection (interpreted by Sophie Hughes), protagonists Tom and Anna are, depending on your point of view, the beneficiaries or victims of technological disruptions like Airbnb and Instagram. Several times a year they increase their income by changing their apartments in Berlin, packing their laptops and going to their parents for weekends or holidays.
For Tom and Anna, “home” is an artfully protected space – the book so accurately pokes fun at the millennial beauty found on IG and IRL that it was hard for a millennial to look at her mid-century coffee table a few years after reading it. But no matter how clearly we make our paintings, or how skillfully we arrange the plants in our houses, true perfection cannot be achieved: real life is difficult, difficult, always interferes.
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Latronico shows how futile and illusory the pursuit of perfection is, but he has no easy answers. Infrastructure that was once thought to be a given (stable employment, reliable housing, financial security) has become increasingly uncertain. For young, urban, educated people like Tom and Anna, the domestic space is no longer a reception area, but another source of income, whose cost (always difficult, unstable) is more risky than the gain.
Anxiety about how to live here is also at the heart of Ayşegül Savaş’s novel The Anthropologists, which follows a young couple to a foreign city. For Asya and Manu, who do not have the same heritage, home life is about how much of their culture they can protect from their culture, and what they can create for themselves.
Like the book Perfection, it is a small book, but its concerns are many. Savaş realizes that everyday life has a sacred quality alongside the banal, or perhaps it is the nature of banality – with its rituals and repetition – that makes it sacred. We all face a few big decisions (career, family, where to settle), but it’s the infinite small ones – how we spend our Sundays, how we socialize with our neighbors, how we take our morning coffee – that shape our sense of purpose, meaning and happiness in the world.
In 2024, when I was confused and unsure about my novel in progress, Miranda July’s All Fours fell on my desk: a disturbing, strange and funny idea about testing the limits and boundaries of everyday life.
July shows a family full of love and friendship, yet the narrator does not shy away from the conflict that even the best situations (a happy child, an engaged parent) can evoke for a working mother: “Walking in my house alone I felt tormented, guilty for everything I did or did not do.” He likens re-entering the house after a day at his desk to “Buzz Aldrin getting ready to unload the dishwasher right after coming back from the moon”. Dorothy who has just returned from Oz can feel sorry for herself.
In the month of July, domestic events as a place of refuge become difficult: what was familiar becomes strange. In All Fours he turns the question of how to honor a creative person while still living on earth into such a quest that, by the end of the book, it’s as if we too have been going to space and back, standing dumbfounded in our kitchens, clutching the washing up basket.
All Four it made me look at my writings again, I am convinced that the home book is not to be studied or kept quiet, or any other boring words; and a new understanding that the house – where we are so intimate, so invisible – can be as powerful, alive and stimulating to nature as anything we can encounter behind the front door.
