House Hold: A Memoir of Place - Hardcover

Peters, Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0299296202 ISBN 13: 9780299296209

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014

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 traveling 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.

About this title

About the Author

Ann Peters is associate professor of English at Stern College, Yeshiva University, and the recipient of the 2012 McGinnis Ritchie Award for Nonfiction. She lives in Brooklyn and in upstate New York.

From Booklist

A literature teacher and the daughter of an architect, Peters has a strong and compelling perspective on the sense of place in life and literature. She grew up in a modern house perched on a ledge in the woods of eastern Wisconsin. Designed by her father, it represented social striving and was meant to be “a map of an inventive mind” but remained at the nexus of family strife after her parents’ divorce. It set them apart from others and sparked a lifelong search for belonging. Peters ties her memories to great stories of small-town life by Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and others. Twenty years of living in New York evokes romantic notions about the city drawn from the writings of Willa Cather and Paule Marshall. Eventually, Peters buys a small house in upstate New York. All along, she ponders her constantly changing landscape, resenting changing and reluctantly conceding her participation in that change, resigning herself to living inside others’ history. Peters writes beautifully of the meaning of authenticity and the need to belong. --Vanessa Bush

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0299296202
• ISBN 13: 9780299296209
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 286