Reading Home

How memoirs are teaching me to write my own

"Sometimes we want to un-belong as much as we want to belong." Deborah Levy

There is a particular kind of reading that does not feel like reading at all. For me it feels like permission. Like someone has quietly handed me the key, to realise I have been standing outside a door I did not know was mine to open. This is what happened to me last week, all thanks to Penny Wincer. She spoke about how to give ourselves permission on one of the episodes on her brilliant podcast, all part of her writers community The Fold. And her latest publication Home Matters has been a timely read for me this month. So obviously I gave myself permission to dedicate more time to reading memoirs about home, about the search for it, the longing for it, the complicated, layered, sometimes grief-stricken love of a place that has claimed me. These books are changing how I think about my own story, and one that is already writing itself.

If you’ve been following my stories here on substack you’ll know that one of my favourite writers is Deborah Levy. Real Estate is the third and final instalment in Levy’s living autobiography trilogy - a boldly intimate meditation on home. I’ve read it more times than I can honestly account for, and each time i read it gives me something different. What draws me back is not simply the prose, luminous as it is, but the freedom of the form Levy has invented for herself. The trilogy is a pioneering examination of a female life lived in the storm of the present tense, which I found fascinating. Throughout the book it’s as though she’s asking essential questions about womanhood, creative identity and personal freedom. I’ve been inspired by the way she manages to write from inside the motion of living, catching thoughts as they arrive, very much like my journalling practice.

What Levy understands, and what Real Estate enacts is that home is never merely a building. Her inventory of possessions, real and imagined, pushes readers to question our cultural understanding of belonging and belongings. Levy, like me fantasises about the home she would like to own, aware that such a refuge is beyond her means, yet nonetheless amassing objects to furnish it. Its exactly what I’m doing with Cartrefle.

As Levy gives me form, Hannah Kent gives me the landscape.

Always Home, Always Homesick is Hannah Kent’s love letter to a land that has forged a nation of storytellers, her ode to the transcendent power of creativity. What captured me about Kent’s memoir is its quality of attention. She does not simply describe Iceland - she inhabits it, rendering the landscape with a precision that is also kind of a devotion to the place. Her writing is teaching me how to look, how to listen, how to let a place speak through me rather than simply speaking about it.

As is in Wales, the word Hiraeth (pronounced heer-eyeth) is a Welsh word with no direct English translation, representing a deep, bittersweet longing, nostalgia, or yearning for a home, place, or time that is lost, unattainable, or perhaps never existed at all. It combines a profound sense of homesickness with a nostalgic ache for the past or for a deep connection to Welsh culture. Therefore reading Kent mention the Icelandic word Heimpra, which is used to describe the longing for home was cathartic.

Reading Kent alongside Levy, I began to see a conversation taking place between these two books, one I hadn’t expected. Both are asking the same question: what does it mean to belong to a place. What does a place do to you, over time, that you can only understand when you try to write it down? Both suggest that the act of writing and the act of belonging are not separate things. They are the same thing, approached from different directions.

"The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned." Maya Angelou

And this is where, increasingly, I find myself.

I’m about to spend at least a year as a project manager for the refurbishment of Cartrefle - a beach house I have been in a long-distance love affair with for the past decade. The name itself, Cartref in Welsh, simply means home. There is something almost too pointed about that, too symbolic to ignore. This place has been in my life for ten years as a longing, a recurring presence, an elsewhere that has always felt like a here. Now I will live inside its transformation, watching it become itself again, or perhaps become something new - and I will be there, at close as I can possibly be, with my notebook.

My memoir will not be a straightforward account of a renovation. It will be the story of what a place holds, and what it gives back. I’m hoping it will weave the practical and the poetic, the unexpected discovery behind a wall, the particular quality of light off the sea at certain times of year, the grief and the hope that accumulate in a building I love. It will reach back into ten years of longing and forward into whatever Cartrefle is becoming. Like Levy’s trilogy, it will be written from inside the present tense, alive to what is happening now. Like Kent’s memoir, it will try to fit light to paper.

Reading has done what it always does best, when it does it well. It has made me less afraid. These writers have shown me that the subject I have been circling, home, place, belonging, the love of somewhere that has no simple name, is not too small for literature. It is, in fact, exactly the right size. It is the size of everything that matters. All I need now is the will to keep writing, to keep on keeping on, to document the moments of this extraordinary time of my life.

If you’re in the journalling mood, as I always am, please help yourself to one or all of these prompts:

• Which landscape feels most like your inner world: coast, mountain, city, or forest? Write about why that landscape speaks to something essential in you.

• Has a place ever changed you, quietly, over time? So that you became a different person for having been there? Write about the before and the after of that transformation.

• Is there a place connected to your heritage or ancestry that you have never been to, or only recently visited? What does it mean to belong somewhere you have never lived?

• If someone were to write a memoir about you, which place would be its true setting, the landscape that holds your deepest story? Why that place, and not another?

Until the next time

Take care and stay safe xx

About me… I’m Tanya Lynch, a mother, a ridgeback owner and the founder of Ease Retreats. I love what I do, collaborating with authors and creatives, hosting retreats in beautiful venues across the UK. I’m also a therapeutic journaling coach and through my online programme Rage on a Page, I help midlife women channel their emotions into something more positive and creative. Each Thursday I host an online journalling club called Journal with Ease and it’s free for paid subscribers to attend. If you have any questions about the benefits of therapeutic journalling, please reach out and connect. I’m usually on a beach walking the dogs, hosting retreats or project managing the refurbishment of Cartrefle.