What a House Can Hold

"Writers only know how to begin," Laura Childs Gill declares in one of her many attempts to trace the origin of the desires that upended her comfortable life. Did it begin when she asked B. to get a beer? Or was the impulse inherited along her paternal side, a lineage of writers who'd also fallen in love outside of marriage – who'd also always been leaving? // In What a House Can Hold, Gill's meditative essays take form around her inability to neatly narrativize her domestic and creative crises. Visiting the houses of Dickinson, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, driving through the Florida Keys with her father, the Mojave Desert with her mother, and the American South alone, Gill searches for answers to her questions about how one leaves, and builds, a home. At once about the loss of a previous self and the acceptance of a new one, What a House Can Hold contends with, and exemplifies, what happens when the structures designed to contain us – marriages, homes, habits, self-mythologies – no longer can.