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I have pasted the author's description of the book below because he explained it better than I could.
From the author's website:
I've been meaning to read this book for 6 months or so but didn't get to it until last month. Given our upcoming move and the recent time spent thinking about what we want in a home, I think the timing was perfect. I also identified with the camping out in your own home while remodeling experience. Some people might find the tangents on suburbs distracting but I thought it was interesting. (btw, suburbs in this context are the very early streetcar suburbs, started around 1920). Before reading this, I really didn't know much about Cleveland or that general area of the country and I liked hearing about the history and growth of the city.
There is an interesting twist at the end of this book that I am hesitant to describe that has more to do with the role of home in family life. I don't want to spoil anything but it is another aspect of the book that I can identify with.
If you have lived in Cleveland, or remodeled a home, or felt the pull of houselust, you will probably like this book.
From the author's website:
When my wife and I bought a century old house in a suburb of my beloved city, I knew I had to write about it. The experience of purchasing a home place, among the most common events in an adult's life, felt more cataclysmic than, well, buying a house ought to feel. Second to childbirth on the seismic charts of human emotion. Suspicious of any prolonged navel-gazing, I didn't intend a memoir. I began the story as a novel. I sent seventy-five pages to my agent who said, "I can't sell this as a novel, but I can as a memoir."
So I started over and what I discovered was that a house was inseparable from, and in many ways shaped by, the terrain on which it lived. This particular terrain was not just compelling to me, it was alive with ghosts of the past. The explosion of the suburbs in the late 18th and early 19th century was told in microcosm just outside my door. The families that had lived in this house told their own stories, all but forced themselves upon us, were still here. The contractors and real estate agents and house inspectors who moved through this structure added their own stories. And of course, the upper stratum of the narrative--the story of my family's life in the new structure, first as castaways on the third floor while the renovation was completed, and then as a miniature army of four advancing room by room, taking over foreign territory one front at a time and making it ours.
House: A Memoir is an attempt to order and make sense of all these stories.
It's also an answer to all the people who ask me why I still live in Cleveland. I never doubted the urge but I'd never explored the reason or understood the importance of living out my adult life in the place where I spent my childhood and adolescence, an increasing rarity in our vagabond culture. House: A Memoir is a love song to home, to the controversial notion of the suburb in America, to living where you grew up, to the history of this country and to the most contentious story of all, how we're using place in America.
So I started over and what I discovered was that a house was inseparable from, and in many ways shaped by, the terrain on which it lived. This particular terrain was not just compelling to me, it was alive with ghosts of the past. The explosion of the suburbs in the late 18th and early 19th century was told in microcosm just outside my door. The families that had lived in this house told their own stories, all but forced themselves upon us, were still here. The contractors and real estate agents and house inspectors who moved through this structure added their own stories. And of course, the upper stratum of the narrative--the story of my family's life in the new structure, first as castaways on the third floor while the renovation was completed, and then as a miniature army of four advancing room by room, taking over foreign territory one front at a time and making it ours.
House: A Memoir is an attempt to order and make sense of all these stories.
It's also an answer to all the people who ask me why I still live in Cleveland. I never doubted the urge but I'd never explored the reason or understood the importance of living out my adult life in the place where I spent my childhood and adolescence, an increasing rarity in our vagabond culture. House: A Memoir is a love song to home, to the controversial notion of the suburb in America, to living where you grew up, to the history of this country and to the most contentious story of all, how we're using place in America.
There is an interesting twist at the end of this book that I am hesitant to describe that has more to do with the role of home in family life. I don't want to spoil anything but it is another aspect of the book that I can identify with.
If you have lived in Cleveland, or remodeled a home, or felt the pull of houselust, you will probably like this book.
), and it's not like the old place wasn't also within walking distance of a couple of good shopping areas. I think after a while I was so annoyed by his attitude, I was reading to pick out more things to be annoyed by about him.
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