Genre: Contemporary Fiction Publication.Date
August 12th 2014Pages: 400 Published By: Atria Books Website Lisa Jewell The House We Grew Up In Goodreads I received a copy from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review
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Meet the Bird family. They live in a honey-colored house in a picture-perfect Cotswolds village, with rambling, unkempt gardens stretching beyond. Pragmatic Meg, dreamy Beth, and tow-headed twins Rory and Rhys all attend the village school and eat home-cooked meals together every night. Their father is a sweet gangly man named Colin, who still looks like a teenager with floppy hair and owlish, round-framed glasses. Their mother is a beautiful hippy named Lorelei, who exists entirely in the moment. And she makes every moment sparkle in her children's lives.
Then one Easter weekend, tragedy comes to call. The event is so devastating that, almost imperceptibly, it begins to tear the family apart. Years pass as the children become adults, find new relationships, and develop their own separate lives. Soon it seems as though they've never been a family at all. But then something happens that calls them back to the house they grew up in -- and to what really happened that Easter weekend so many years ago.
Told in gorgeous, insightful prose that delves deeply into the hearts and minds of its characters, The House We Grew Up In is the captivating story of one family's desire to restore long-forgotten peace and to unearth the many secrets hidden within the nooks and crannies of home.
What inspired you to write THE HOUSE WE GREW UP IN ?
I’d just abandoned another book after three months
and didn't have another idea in the bank to switch over to. So I started
taking longs walks in the hope that inspiration would strike me. Then
one day I looked up at the window of a flat
that was clearly hoarded – opaquely dirty windows, drawn curtains,
dusty paperwork piled onto the window sill – and I started wondering
about who lived there and how their life had ended up like that. Then I
overwhelmingly saw a structure that could make a
great story – a house that becomes so hoarded by a mother that it
forces her children to abandon it – and her – and then the arc that
would bring them back together again to clear out the hoard and mend
their broken family. Lorelei and her rambling messy cottage
and her four children came to me instantly and fully formed.
Do you have a specific writing style?
If by style you mean ‘style of writing’,
then no. I don't think any writer deliberately sets out to write in a
particular style. It's just the way you write, it's innate. If you mean
‘how I write’ then yes, I have a very specific way of
writing; chaotically! I don't plan and I don't structure. I just dive
in and see where I end up. Sometimes this works beautifully for me,
other times it is disastrous. But if I try to be more organized, I lose
my way because it doesn't feel organic.
How did you come up with the title?
The working title for the book was The Bird House.
But as is nearly always the way, my publishers didn't feel that was
quite right and there were literally weeks of back and forth and
brainstorming until my editor finally said;
The House We Grew Up In? and everyone said ‘yes!’ and sighed with relief!
Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
I'm not one for messages. I am more
interested in creating involving worlds that people can inhabit for a
few hundred pages, and characters who to do interesting things within
that world whether it's falling in love, compulsively hoarding
or trying to find a long lost father. If someone spots a message in
there that means something to them, that makes them think about things
in a particular way, then that is completely unpremeditated and of
course, rather wonderful.
What books have influenced your life most?
All books have influenced me in one way or
another, even if it's just to throw it across the room! But the book
that changed my life entirely was
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. I’d been planning to write my first
novel at 50 when my (as yet nonexistent) children were grown and I’d
had lots of life experience. Then I read Nick’s book and realized that
the experiences I was having as a young, childless,
unmarried woman living in London and doing crappy jobs were completely
relevant and legitimate material for a novel. I started writing my first
novel two weeks after I finished reading it
What book are you reading now?
I am currently reading a book called Daughter by
Jane Shemilt. It’s a debut novel about a mother whose teenage daughter
disappeared a year before and has still not been found. I’m only a
couple of chapters into it but I can already
tell it’s my kind of book. It’s nice to be reading something new after
the Goldfinch, which I started on holiday in August and only just
finished this weekend! It was wonderful but I do sometimes delay
getting into overly long books, as they eat into
my precious reading time. There's so many books I want to read!
Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?
I love Penny Hancock, Tamar Cohen and Louise
Millar, who are all three books into their writing careers and writing
about quite dark themes that really appeal to me right now.
If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything in THE HOUSE WE GREW UP IN?
No, definitely not. It was the most fun of all my
books to write. I genuinely enjoyed coming to it every day and I cannot
say that about any of my other books. It has also had a truly great
reception from readers, bloggers and reviewers.
So no, for once, I think I got it pretty spot on!
Do you recall how your interest in writing originated?
I think as for my nearly every writer, it
started as a child. I wrote a lot of poetry and read four books a week
and just knew that I really wasn't gifted in any other way. It would be
writing or nothing.
Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?
The most challenging thing is finding the
plot. Because I always start without a plot I have to let it reveal
itself to me page by page and of course that needs to be executed in
such a way that the reader doesn't have to hang around waiting
for it all to fall into place. I can get really impatient and
incredibly frustrated when I can feel it floating away from me and have
to try somehow to pull it back. Sometimes it feels technically
impossible. But I always manage it in the end.
I'm just dealing with a toxic family. I've managed to keep them away for all these years, and now they're drifting back and I know it has to happen but, still it's a lot to take on board.
The last thing she should be doing in this condition of pathetic mental frailty was traveling across the entire planet to be reunited with her family. She'd tried to get out of it. She'd tried to persuade her mother that it would be better if she didn't come. She'd invented logistic hurdles that her mother had battled effortlessly out of the way. And then she'd found an iota of strength from somewhere and persuaded herself that she could do it, that she should do it, that she would do it.
At the heart of this story is a woman, desperate to leave her past
behind and create a new life full of beauty, imagination and joy and
give her children the childhood that she missed out on. This is a
journey of rainbows and fairy tales, egg hunts and picture book
fantasies that is held together by the fragile thread of growing up.
Once her children are older Lorelei's whimsy and quirky nature become an
embarrassment. They no longer understand her and find her to be a burden to her children.
A tragedy in the family sends Lorelei, the main protaganist in this novel, over the edge and what was a quirk now becomes a serious hoarding issue. Each child walks away from the tragedy and their mother with their own problems and the perfect little bubble that Lorelei thought she had wrapped her family in ends up coming to a screeching hault.
This book touched so many parts of me. As a mother I identified with wanting to create a beautiful universe for my children and the reality that no matter what you do as a parent, your children will always find it lacking in some way. As a daughter it made me smile to remember being embarrassed of my own mother and how big her quirks seemed to be to me. As a woman I recognized the need to be understood and accepted for my own quirks and as a sister I understood the magic thread that holds you together - because no-one understands your family like you do. There were so many parts to this book, most will find something relatable to their own life.
I really enjoyed the way the writer let this story evolve and how the
answers to this family's life-long questions were slowly revealed via
their Mom's emails. This is, to say the least a complex set of
characters and this book has humor, love and lots of heartbreak. I
also found the psychological elements and the diagnosis of their Mom's
illness very interesting. It is not a condition I was aware existed and
it was insightful to see how devastating it can be to an individual and
to their family.
This novel was fun, tragic, heartwarming, suspenseful, playful, and well told. A beautifully written family saga that is worth the read!
About the Author
school in Finchley. After leaving school at sixteen she spent two years
at Barnet College doing an arts foundation course and then two years at
Epsom School of Art & Design studying Fashion Illustration and
Communication. She worked for the fashion chain Warehouse for three years as a PR assistant and then for Thomas Pink, the Jermyn Street shirt company for four years as a receptionist and PA. She started her first novel, Ralph’s Party, for a bet in 1996. She finished it in 1997 and it was published by Penguin books
in May 1998. It went on to become the best-selling debut novel of that year. She has since written a further nine novels, as is currently at work on her eleventh.
She now lives in an innermost part of north London with her husband Jascha, an IT consultant
, her daughters, Amelie and Evie and her silver tabbies, Jack and Milly.
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