Overview
A literary exploration of one of life’s most taxing, emotional, and pervasive experiences: moving.
When acclaimed memoirist and scholar Louise DeSalvo sold the house she and her husband had raised their children in and moved to a beautiful new home in Montclair, New Jersey, she was shocked to discover a rash of unexpected emotions interfering with her plans. Suddenly the old, cramped house was paradise, and the new house a barren building with none of the comforts or familiarity of “home.” Faced with a sudden disillusionment over her dream house, DeSalvo turned, as she always has, to her favorite writers.
What she found was a treasure trove of material, most of which has seldom been written about before, chronicling the tumultuous and inspiring moves of some of our most beloved literary figures. Percy Shelley, destitute and restless, moved his tired family from one home to another, only to settle in what he came to believe was a haunted house on the Gulf of Spezia (in which he soon drowned). Virginia Woolf, on her hunt for the perfect room of her own, was a real estate hound, and spent years trying to get back to her home in London after a nervous breakdown forced her to relocate to the country. More recently, Mark Doty found selling the house he and his dying lover had spent decades renovating surprisingly freeing as the couple found a new home in which to say goodbye.
DeSalvo discovers that the pain, hope, and turmoil involved in moving have been universal for generations. On Moving mines the hopes, disappointments, memories, and fears that come with that simple yet fundamental part of everyone’s lives: moving.
Synopsis
A literary exploration of one of life’s most taxing, emotional, and pervasive experiences: moving.
When acclaimed memoirist and scholar Louise DeSalvo sold the house she and her husband had raised their children in and moved to a beautiful new home in Montclair, New Jersey, she was shocked to discover a rash of unexpected emotions interfering with her plans. Suddenly the old, cramped house was paradise, and the new house a barren building with none of the comforts or familiarity of “home.” Faced with a sudden disillusionment over her dream house, DeSalvo turned, as she always has, to her favorite writers.
What she found was a treasure trove of material, most of which has seldom been written about before, chronicling the tumultuous and inspiring moves of some of our most beloved literary figures. Percy Shelley, destitute and restless, moved his tired family from one home to another, only to settle in what he came to believe was a haunted house on the Gulf of Spezia (in which he soon drowned). Virginia Woolf, on her hunt for the perfect room of her own, was a real estate hound, and spent years trying to get back to her home in London after a nervous breakdown forced her to relocate to the country. More recently, Mark Doty found selling the house he and his dying lover had spent decades renovating surprisingly freeing as the couple found a new home in which to say goodbye.
DeSalvo discovers that the pain, hope, and turmoil involved in moving have been universal for generations. On Moving mines the hopes, disappointments, memories, and fears that come with that simple yet fundamental part of everyone’s lives: moving.
The Barnes & Noble Review
There can never be enough written on the shocks of moving away from a long-settled home. With the same clean snip in the thread of your identity that ending a romantic relationship can give you, to say nothing of the work of fitting everything you own into small cardboard boxes and watching it all drive away in a truck, moving can be one of the most liberating, terrifying, traumatic passages in a person's life; and one of the hardest to bounce back from. So why isn't moving a bigger subject? There are no sonnet cycles about moving, no epic novel of the real estate market (although the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry could bear some novelistic fruit before too long). When people do write about moving there's always something shy about it, as if writers are embarrassed to care so complexly about something so apparently ordinary.