The House We Grew Up in Review

           
Navid Tajkhorshid
            The House We Grew Up in by Lia Jewell is a story about a family that was broken apart and then came back together. It touches on some pretty interesting and complex themes, and I would recommend it to anyone who is in the mood to read a bittersweet story.

            The book is structured in an unorthodox way: There are three main timelines in the story. The first is the present day of the story (April 2011). This follows one of the main characters, Megan, and her daughter Molly, as they clean out the house of their recently deceased mother. The second timeline starts in the far past (~ 1973) and follows Meg and her family growing up. The third is a series of letters from Megan’s mother, Lorelei, to her “lover,” Jim, taking place just before she died (November 2010). Each of these storylines creep along, some faster than others (the past spans decades, the letters months, and the present days) and they all converge on each other. The reveal of information is very interesting, because the reader has to piece the clues and bits together to see the big picture. It can be a little hard to follow in the beginning, at the book jumps between all three timelines within four pages, but it is a nice deviation from the traditional, linear path that most stories take.

            The main set of characters consists of the Bird family: Lorelei, the mother, Colin, the father, Megan and Beth, the daughters, and Rory and Rhys, twin boys. They were by many standards a perfect family, at least in their first 20ish years, but when Rhys takes his own life on Easter Sunday, they start to drift apart. Megan goes off to make her own family, Rory goes with his girlfriend to live in Spain, and Beth has to stay at home to tend to her mother. Lorelei had a knack for keeping memories of her children, but it turns into a hoarding disorder. She pushes Colin away and shields herself with walls of mementos. The rest of the book follows each individual storyline (yes, the past story is split up even more) until they converge in the present.

SPOILERS!

            The main theme of the book is about closure and coming to terms with your past. Megan must come to terms with her mother, whom she has fallen apart with, Beth must come to terms with her father, who married Rory’s ex-pretty-much-wife who already had a kid (I can’t get into it), and Rory must come to terms with the death of his brother, Rhys. Overall, I think these arcs were executed pretty well. While there are certainly large elements of plot, the story feels more character driven. Nothing miraculous happens to get Beth to accept her father; instead she naturally begins to understand that the world is not just the way she wants it to be, and she has to live with that. Beth’s story of acceptance in particular felt the most human, mainly because it deals with very human issues that we all face, and I personally could relate to that. The plot is crafted to compliment the character arcs, not the other way around. Megan’s story is also very interesting, and coming to terms with a mother who she did everything to not be like was entertaining to read.

            However, the one arc I did not like was that of Rory. Remember what I said about the plot not being overbearing and pushing characters unnaturally? Well, throw that out of the window because Rory’s story is one of the most confusing I have ever read. He makes a family which he loves, but then leaves them to becomes a drug dealer. He then gets arrested, and when he comes back home, he goes, “Well, I guess I’ll have to live with Rhys’s death.” The writing also hits us over the head with the fact that Rhys’s death had not been anyone’s fault, (show not tell?), and Rory’s story just felt weak in comparison to everyone else’s

            There is one story that I did not mention, though, and it is the heart and soul of the book and the reason why I like it so much: the story of Lorelei. Aside from the fact that it is a refreshing subversion to have the character with the least page-time to have the main arc (and those pages are adequate, trust me), it feels like hers was the main thread around which all her children’s stories wrapped around. This story takes place in the “letter timeline” of the book, where she writes to her lover Jim and talks about everything that happened. She talks about all the other threads of her children, and it feels like sitting in a therapy session and watching her pour her heart and soul out. Her arc is about finding closure with all of her mementos, all of the things that she hid with so she would not be alone when her children left her, and finally breaking free of them. She slowly starts to realize that what she is doing is bad for her mind and body, and racks up the will to visit her letter lover. In the end, a tragic accident occurs, and Lorelei dies, bringing us to the present timeline. However, it was not about whether she lived or died, what mattered was that she was that she broke free in the end. This beautifully wraps up the stories of her children as well, mainly Megan, who were all troubled by her situation. By setting herself free, she set all of her children free.

             I should mention that there is a lot of stuff I was not able to cover. In fact, an earlier draft of this review had me following each and every one of the members of the Bird family’s stories (the father also had one!) for about a page, until it just got too long. And I think that is a testament to how detailed the book is willing to go. It opened every thread, and while some of them were questionable (Rory), they came back together in a way that made the story more tangible and real, while not sacrificing the plot opportunities given by a fictional story. In the end, what makes The House We Grew Up in special is its ability to represent all the small and large threads of a family, while still not feeling slow or overbearing. It could have been a 50-page story about a woman struggling with hoarding, or a boy dealing with a dead twin, but in bringing everything together, it has become more than the sum of its parts. In the end, if you are patient and willing put in a little work to follow the story, I can give you a wholehearted recommendation.