Things in Every Room

A beautiful, beguiling memoir of growing up in a family marred by addiction but saved by love

Nine years after her father’s death, Helen holes up in her childhood home with her mother for a summer of eating, talking, telling stories and confronting ghosts. She unlocks the tragedy of her parents' marriage, her father's alcoholism, and how the emotional weather of childhood shaped the impulses of the young woman she has become.

Funny and sorrowful, Helen is an attentive observer of lost boys, dead dads, children left to their own devices, and particularly her own mother, whose own gift for narrative is a complicated inheritance. ‘Heartbreak is not so bad,’ Helen’s mother muses on a wet summer’s day in southwest England. ‘But a walled-up heart… why stay suffering?’

In her childhood home, her father’s briefcase, his office, and finally his desk – untouched since his death – loom in the wet atmosphere. She begins to open the drawers.