House Hold: A Memoir of Place

New
Hardcover
2014
$26.01

Like the house built by Ann Peters's father on a hill in eastern Wisconsin, House Hold offers many views: cornfields and glacial lakes, fast food parking lots and rural highways, Manhattan apartments and Brooklyn brownstones. Peters revisits the modern split-level where she grew up in Wisconsin, remembering her architect father. Against the background of this formative space, she charts her roaming story through two decades of New York City apartments, before travelling to a cabin in the mountains of Colorado and finally purchasing an old farmhouse in upstate New York.

More than a memoir of remembered landscapes, House Hold is also an expansive contemplation of America, a meditation on place and property, and an exploration of how literature shapes our thinking about the places we live. A gifted prose stylist, Peters seamlessly combines her love of buildings with her love of books. She wanders through the rooms of her past but also through what Henry James called the house of fiction, interweaving personal narrative with musings on James, Willa Cather, William Dean Howells, Paule Marshall, William Maxwell, and others. Peters reflects on the romance of pastoral retreat, the hazards of nostalgia, America's history of expansion and land ownership, and the conflicted desires to put down roots and to hit the road. Throughout House Hold, she asks how places make us who we are.

Synopsis

Like the house built by Ann Peters's father on a hill in eastern Wisconsin, House Hold offers many views: cornfields and glacial lakes, fast food parking lots and rural highways, Manhattan apartments and Brooklyn brownstones. Peters revisits the modern split-level where she grew up in Wisconsin, remembering her architect father. Against the background of this formative space, she charts her roaming story through two decades of New York City apartments, before travelling to a cabin in the mountains of Colorado and finally purchasing an old farmhouse in upstate New York.

More than a memoir of remembered landscapes, House Hold is also an expansive contemplation of America, a meditation on place and property, and an exploration of how literature shapes our thinking about the places we live. A gifted prose stylist, Peters seamlessly combines her love of buildings with her love of books. She wanders through the rooms of her past but also through what Henry James called the house of fiction, interweaving personal narrative with musings on James, Willa Cather, William Dean Howells, Paule Marshall, William Maxwell, and others. Peters reflects on the romance of pastoral retreat, the hazards of nostalgia, America's history of expansion and land ownership, and the conflicted desires to put down roots and to hit the road. Throughout House Hold, she asks how places make us who we are.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 272
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 30 Jan 2014
ISBN 10: 0299296202
ISBN 13: 9780299296209

Media Reviews

House Hold sketches the progress of one woman's life according to the blueprint of those spaces--architectural and familial and literary--she has inhabited. Here is an autobiography told through buildings and books, then, and the characters that inhabit both are vividly rendered and entirely memorable. --Christopher Bakken, author of Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table

In House Hold , Ann Peters has built a literary edifice that seamlessly combines memoir, meditation and literary analysis. From Wisconsin to the boroughs of New York City and, at last, a farmhouse in upstate New York, Peters brings alive for herself and her readers the places she has lived in and dreamed of. --Willard Spiegelman, author of Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness

Peters has engagingly blended her experiences of 'dwelling' and the final impossibility of possessing space with the experiences of American writers such as Henry James, Willa Cather, Walt Whitman, Paule Marshall, and William Maxwell. --Margot Peters, author of Lorine Niedecker: A Poet's Life

In House Hold, Ann Peters has built a literary edifice that seamlessly combines memoir, meditation and literary analysis. From Wisconsin to the boroughs of New York City and, at last, a farmhouse in upstate New York, Peters brings alive for herself and her readers the places she has lived in and dreamed of. --Willard Spiegelman, author of Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness

Nostalgia is a complicated version of love, Peters reveals in this elegiac memoir, which can threaten to fade the vivid present to a sepia-toned past. -- Kirkus Reviews

Peters writes beautifully on the meaning of authenticity and the need to belong. -- Booklist

House Hold sketches the progress of one woman s life according to the blueprint of those spacesarchitectural and familial and literaryshe has inhabited. Here is an autobiography told through buildings and books, then, and the characters that inhabit both are vividly rendered and entirely memorable. Christopher Bakken, author of Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table

In House Hold, Ann Peters has built a literary edifice that seamlessly combines memoir, meditation and literary analysis. From Wisconsin to the boroughs of New York City and, at last, a farmhouse in upstate New York, Peters brings alive for herself and her readers the places she has lived in and dreamed of. Willard Spiegelman, author of Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness

House Hold has the makings of an American classic: a perceptive and deeply affecting book about belonging to a place and yet never quite belonging. Alice Kaplan, Yale University
House Hold sketches the progress of one woman s life according to the blueprint of those spacesarchitectural and familial and literaryshe has inhabited. Here is an autobiography told through buildings and books, then, and the characters that inhabit both are vividly rendered and entirely memorable. Christopher Bakken, author of Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table

At a moment when the American dream of home is in jeopardy, comes Ann Peters s utterly engaging and singular memoir. Telling the stories of the houses she has inhabited, the landscapes, writers and people who have given her life meaning, she reminds us the search for home is also a quest for the soul s refuge, and that an account of the places of one s life can be a source of revelation. Honor Moore, author of The Bishop s Daughter
In House Hold, Ann Peters has built a literary edifice that seamlessly combines memoir, meditation and literary analysis. From Wisconsin to the boroughs of New York City and, at last, a farmhouse in upstate New York, Peters brings alive for herself and her readers the places she has lived in and dreamed of. Willard Spiegelman, author of Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness

Peters has engagingly blended her experiences of dwelling and the final impossibility of possessing space with the experiences of American writers such as Henry James, Willa Cather, Walt Whitman, Paule Marshall, and William Maxwell. Margot Peters, author of Lorine Niedecker: A Poet s Life

Nostalgia is a complicated version of love, Peters reveals in this elegiac memoir, which can threaten to fade the vivid present to a sepia-toned past. Kirkus Reviews

Peters writes beautifully on the meaning of authenticity and the need to belong. Booklist

Author Bio

Ann Peters is assistant professor of English at Stern College, Yeshiva University, USA and the recipient of the 2012 McGinnis Ritchie Award for Nonfiction.