On Moving
A Writer's Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again
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- US$14.99
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- US$14.99
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When acclaimed memoirist and scholar Louise DeSalvo sold the house she and her husband had raised their children in and moved to a beautiful new home in Montclair, New Jersey, she was shocked to discover a rash of unexpected emotions interfering with her plans. Suddenly the old, cramped house was paradise, and the new house a barren building with none of the comforts or familiarity of "home." Faced with a sudden disillusionment over her dream house, DeSalvo turned, as she always has, to her favorite writers.
What she found was a treasure-trove of material, most of which has seldom been written about before, chronicling the tumultuous and inspiring moves of some of our most beloved literary figures. Percy Shelley, destitute and restless, moved his tired family from one home to another, only to settle in what he came to believe was a haunted house on the Gulf of Spezia, in which he soon drowned. Virginia Woolf, on her hunt for the perfect room of her own, was a real estate hound, and spent years trying to get back to her home in London after a nervous breakdown forced her to relocate to the country. More recently, Mark Doty found selling the house he and his dying lover spent decades renovating surprisingly freeing as the couple found a new home in which to say goodbye.
DeSalvo mines the hopes, disappointments, memories, and fears that come with that simple yet fundamental part of everyone's lives ... moving.
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From Percy Blythe Shelley's ultimately fatal moving habits to Elizabeth Bishop's endless search for a true home, author and professor DeSalvo chronicles the writer's quest for the perfect home in this memoir-slash-literary history. A noted Virginia Woolf biographer, DeSalvo devotes a hefty portion of the book to Woolf's journey from home to home, and her insight into the poet's turmoil and hope is fascinating. The most compelling parts of the book, however, are DeSalvo's own, both in the particulars and the big picture: "Most of my ancestors' moves, until my parents' and my generation... seem to have been caused by climate change... populations reaching critical levels, or by cataclysmic natural or historical events." Still, DeSalvo's story doesn't feel quite complete; she never adequately resolve her seeming inability to move with the fact of doing so. Early on, she remarks that, like many, she was "blindsided by moving's almost inevitable consequences," and by the book's end she seems not much closer to illumination. Still, her narrative is thought-provoking, and should interest lit fans struggling with a recent or impending move.
