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Home Making is the debut novel from Lee Matalone, whose fiction and essays have been featured in publications such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Denver Quarterly, and Tin House. The novel is a bite-sized (under 200 pages) narrative about the intersections between homemaking, family, and identity. Told in three different voices, the novel begins with the origin story of Cybil, the product of a wartime affair between a Japanese woman and a French soldier, who is given up by her birth mother and adopted by a strict American couple who raises her in Tuscon, Arizona. Cybil is other-ed by the absence of her mother, but also by unique ethnic identity. Thus she struggles to carve out an individual niche within her restrictive surroundings, which complicates her personal and romantic relationships greatly. After two failed marriages and a demanding career as an ob-gyn, all that Cybil is left with is her daughter, Chloe. Fast forward a couple of years, and Chloe herself is struggling with many of the identity problems her mother faced, and as her marriage has ended as a result of her husband’s cancer diagnosis, she struggles to build a home for herself. Her closest confidante is her friend Beau, a young college professor who left his chaotic childhood in southwest Louisiana for the peaceful hills of Virginia in an effort to gain the perspective required to explore his queer identity.
The three characters at the center of this book are united in their struggles to manifest their unique identity, and they each push against traditional models of family, home, and love, associated in their attempts to feel less alone in the world. While the relationships between these characters are quite compelling, I was most intrigued by how Matalone maps themes of identity, family, and belonging onto the concept of building and decorating a physical home. The central dilemma in the story is that Chloe, post-separation, finds herself living all on her own in an empty house and worrying about how she can make this foreign location into a livable space. Having lost her identity as a wife, Chloe internalizes society’s traditional judgements of single and childless women. The importance of place has been passed down to Chloe by her mother, who after moving around frequently as a child, continued living in Chloe’s childhood home well after Chloe had moved out. Chloe remarks, “Even when he moved on from us, she stayed, kept the house for herself, for me. After two husbands, she had learned that men only made home making more difficult. Alone, she could still preserve the fantasy of home… After years of moving around, of willful impermanence, I want to settle, too. I am only now realizing that I am just like her.”
Chloe’s best friend Beau is her main interior design advisor, and ironically, it emerges that Beau’s living space is also in need of a bit of TLC. Beau’s apartment is entirely undecorated, and when his online boyfriend Tyler is scheduled to visit, it is Chloe who in turn helps Beau to decorate in preparation for Tyler’s arrival. This exchange of home making help seems to be its own love language in the novel, as the home becomes a space for the creation of comfort and intimacy between the individuals who converge in it. The act of home making symbolizes a more radical identity creation, and the freedom to carve out one’s own space in the world. Throughout the novel, these three characters begin to discover how important place has been to their development, and how important it is to their aspirations for their individual and collective futures.
Inextricable from the concept of home making is the creation of romantic and familial relationships. Cybil’s life has been defined by desertion, by her mother first and later by her romantic partners, which is part of the reason she is devoted to being present in her own daughter’s life. Cybil recognizes the loneliness that Chloe experiences after the dissolution of her marriage, and with the help of Beau, guides Chloe gently through the grief that she experiences. The characters are united in these themes of lost loves, and can only be redeemed by the creation of new loves, the willingness to resist solitude and adopt a caretaker role. Matalone weaves these larger themes into the voices of her characters quite seamlessly, producing a unique and very much readable meditation on home and identity, animating traditional household objects with lively and energetic prose. This novel is a striking debut, covering a large amount of ground within a sub-200 page count in a thought-provoking and immensely engaging manner.