Appleby House

Appleby House is Sylvia Smith’s delightful, refreshingly candid account of a year spent in a shabby bed-sit in1980s London’s East End.

Smith’s engrossing, understated narrative invests the story of shared living: shifting allegiances, cleaning negotiations, debates about whose turn it is to change the toilet paper (it’s color-coded) and who’s been stealing whose hot water (50p buys 2 baths) with compulsive suspense of the highest order. As tensions build around Laura’s adamant refusal to turn down her music or pretend to care about what her housemates have to say, we find ourselves astonishingly addicted to the goings on in this tiny corner of the universe. In the most artless and amusing way, Appleby House thoroughly indulges our very human fascination with the day-to-day and the surprising, often inexplicable, behavior of our fellow members of the species.

Publishers Weekly

Smith (Misadventures) uses short vignettes to paint a picture of the year she lived in a bedsit in 1984 London's East End in this peculiar, pointillistic memoir. Four women-Sylvia (the narrator), Sharon, Tracey and Laura-and Sharon's boyfriend, Peter, live in a near constant state of subdued battle as squabbles erupt over noise levels, who used up the hot water and who forgot to replace the toilet paper in the shared bathroom. The writing style echoes the simplicity of the lives of the residents of Appleby House, although the prose is frequently graceless and clich d: "She walked towards me," Smith writes of her housemate Sharon, "with a big smile on her face and greeted me with a cheery `Hi.' We were soon deep in conversation." Although the publisher calls this memoir "a very literary equivalent of The Real World," it lacks depth, and the writing keeps the readers at a distance. Smith thoroughly describes buying a used television, where she keeps her kitchen trolley and her amusement over the handprint her landlord, Mr. Appleby, leaves on the phone when he's fixing the house. Yet she uses broader strokes on weightier subjects, skimping on details: "Our personalities clicked," she writes plainly of one of her boyfriends, "but our relationship was spattered with rows." As the book unfolds, many of the chapters feel disjointed, as Smith reveals tiny, tantalizing glimpses of the characters' lives, but leaves them teasingly unexplored. When readers step back to see the whole, this memoir reveals not a picture of the characters, nor even the house itself, but the trivia of everyday life. (Sept. 9) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Born in east London to working-class parents as the Second World War was drawing to its close, Sylvia Smith ducked out of a career in hairdressing at the last minute to begin a life of office work. She slowly and completely accidentally worked her way up to the position of private secretary. She is unmarried with no children. A driving license and a school swimming certificate are her only qualifications, although she is also quite good at dressmaking. Misadventures was published by Canongate in 2001. Appleby House is her second book.