Helen Longstreth

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

An accelerative 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.

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

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

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…

Things in Every Room

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Helen Longstreth

Praise for Things in Every Room

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

An accelerative 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 o ...

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 gr ...

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

An accelerative 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 o ...

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 gr ...

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

An accelerative 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 o ...

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 gr ...

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