Overview

Is heartbreak so bad? A beautiful memoir of growing up in a family marred by addiction but saved by love, from a brilliant new literary voice Move away, run away, wash up on a strange shore and the room is the same. It will always be the same room... The same problems in a new arrangement. Funny, sorrowful and filled with love and life, this beautiful and beguiling memoir goes in search of what we keep behind the doors of the past, how it haunts the present and what it takes to make sense of it all. Helen Longstreth's chaotic childhood- the relentless cycle of her father's alcoholic relapses, the six kids coming and going, the abject apologies and uncertain forgiveness, the meals that bring the family back together again. But while she is studying in America, the land of her parents' birth, her father dies - and it all comes to an abrupt end. In the years that follow, she is drawn back to America and another world of chaotic love and alcoholic madness, dying fathers and lost boys. The same problems in a new arrangement. Ten years after her father's death, Helen returns to her childhood home to spend a rainy summer with her mother, whose own gift for narrative is a complicated inheritance. Her father's office, his briefcase, and his desk - all untouched since his death - loom beneath the leaking roof. At last, she begins to open the drawers...

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9781787335295

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Reviews

A beautiful heart-wrencher of a memoir – valiant, vulnerable, riddled with grief and drenched in love -- Nicci Gerrard

An revelatory true story about love in many forms. Generous to its characters, their failing efforts and effortful failures, their determination to talk and know and touch, to be warm in a world that’s so often cold, yet the writing is never sentimental; instead, so gracefully and diligently honest, without a hint of artifice or judgement. A joyful revelation for the memoir form. I read it in a day, and reread it the next - for me, a modern classic. -- Dizz Tate A wise, empathetic, and beautifully crafted tale of addiction, love, and family strength. This is a memoir I will return to and recommend -- Frances Wilson A heartfelt first book about losing your father and the struggle to move on when you keep doing ‘all the wrong things’. The battle, for herself and others, is with addiction - to drink, drugs, family, work, love and ‘memories hiding under memories’. This is memoir at its most candid, tragic but funny and with an eye for telling detail that few writers can match -- Blake Morrison Things in Every Room is written straight from the heart, like the best memoirs. Tender, compassionate and immersive, it is an intimate study of what it means to love a flawed father and survive the complex grief of losing him too young. This is one of the best memoirs I have read about the insidiousness of depression and addiction, and how it touches everyone in its orbit; it is so often the mother's strength and constancy, and the safety of the family home, which allows for healing in the end. That, and love, and the power of the imagination -- Lily Dunn A beautiful heart-wrencher of a memoir – valiant, vulnerable, riddled with grief and drenched in love -- Nicci Gerrard Memoir can be a dangerous form of writing. You can document your life with courage and honesty, and that is valuable. Very rarely, however, a writer transforms their own life into art. Helen Longstreth is an artist and her book takes enormous risks. It is a masterpiece -- Paul Spike So compelling, moving... it’s a real bravura thing the way her style speeds us along in a kind of wild present tense of living, embracing and wrestling with everything -- Ardashir Vakil A stunning memoir about family, addiction, and the struggle to find one's place in the world and finding one's voice as a writer -- Nicholas Boggs An arresting, distinctive self-portrait alive with the intimate rituals and chaotic spaces of family life and first loves. I read Things in Every Room with pleasure and admiration. -- Chetna Maroo

Author Information

Helen Longstreth is a writer currently based in the UK. She has been published in the New Yorker and Paris Review. She studied previously at the University of Manchester and The University of California, Santa Cruz. Things in Every Room is her debut book, and she is currently working on her first novel.

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