Lisa Jewell’s twelfth novel The House We Grew Up In is a masterpiece of domestic fiction that reminds the reader that life is unpredictable and that all families are dysfunctional. The novel follows the Bird family throughout the lives of the four children: Meg, Beth, Rory, and Rhys as they grow up in a dysfunctional family when all their mother wanted for them was the best life possible. The matriarch of the family is the laidback and eccentric Lorelei who has a lifelong affliction with hoarding. Lorelei feels like there is nothing wrong with keeping all of her stuff, but as the story progresses, so does the hoarding and the family secrets get deeper and darker. With the recent passing of Lorelei, Meg and her eldest child Molly venture to Lorelei’s home to clean up the hoarded items and learn about family secrets along the way and where things went so wrong to cause a tragedy in the Bird house on one particular Easter Sunday. The reader learns about the Bird family through Meg, Beth, and Rory sharing bits and pieces of their lives as they grow up which in turn leads the children through some very interesting and dark times in their family. The reader also has the opportunity to learn about Lorelei herself through emails to her online lover, Jim. The Bird family comes together after years of being apart to uncover where things went wrong in their family and to hopefully recover and find peace in the end.
As the story progresses, the reader has the opportunity to learn about each of the children’s lives and their own suffering that was brought on by the family dysfunction in the Bird house. Each of the children shares their fears, hopes, struggles, and successes with the reader and Jewell brings to light different highs and lows in each of their lives. What is so well done is that Jewell connects each of these things to their shared childhood between the Bird children. Jewell brings in themes such as intergenerational trauma, mental illness, and family dynamics into The House We Grew Up In. Lorelei shares her life as the story progresses and as it goes on it is easy to see that the trauma she had endured as a child has directly influenced each of her children’s mental health and the family dynamics amongst the entire Bird family.
Jewell is a master with words and has created a beautifully haunting story about how family provides both the building blocks and destruction for each individual person. Family is the reason for all that goes right and all that goes wrong in our lives and because of that, we need to be aware of what has happened in our childhood and try to learn from it, to not let is fester. There is no perfect family but family makes us perfectly who we are meant to be.
This novel is a thought provoking story that sheds light on how intergenerational trauma influences each family member and how family dynamics can dictate how we perceive ourselves throughout life. Personally I have found this to be Jewell’s most enticing, in-depth, and inspired story. The House We Grew Up In has taught me that we are truly the by-product of our childhood and that life is going to do as it pleases, we are just along for the ride.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
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.
