"Memory is fantasy; what we carry with us has little to do with fact, everything to do with feeling." (Sammie Downing on The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs)
As part of the blog tour to celebrate the release of Sammie Downing’s The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs, journalists and editors have been sharing reviews of the book for the past two weeks on their blogs, social media profiles, and literary journals in partnership with Half Mystic.
Don’t miss a review by Sophie Allen and Sarah Feng for Counterclock Lit (“This compact novella is an incantatory ode to the resilience of women in the face of a structure that leaves them powerless to control their independence.”), River Adams for Oh Shadows (“This is a story about how the past moves you, even if you can't remember it. How it costs to keep time, even if you're not the one spending it.”), Hannah Rosenthal for Ink & Myths (“I appreciate The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs for the question it raises: If you always carry your house with you, does this mean that you’re never far from home? Or is there more to a home than just the house you live in?”), Margaryta Golovchenko for Anomaly Lit (“Downing shows us that the relationships between women become nodes and lead us to other relationships and the formation of a chosen family, and it is through speaking about trauma, whether realistically or allegorically, that we find comfort in knowing that we’re not alone.”), & Sarah Perchikoff for Bookish Rantings (“If you’re looking for an intriguing fantasy story—that might punch you in the heart—I definitely recommend checking this out.”). Also, an exclusive interview with Sammie here on the Half Mystic blog! Today, Sammie joins us once more for a guest post on the creation process of House…
I worked on The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs for eight years and I am so grateful for all the time and attention it’s received from thoughtful readers so far.
This book began with my love of fairytales. Growing up, my mother was the librarian at my elementary school. She was a single mom and didn’t have the option for daycare, so every night as she perfected her little world, my sister and I spent hours hidden under tables reading every retelling of Cinderella, the Twelve Dancing Princesses and Rumpelstiltskin that we could get our hands on.
As a child, I loved fairytales for their beauty, for their inexplicable sadness, for the women inside of them discovered and redeemed by love. But as I grew older I began to love fairytales for their potential to carry heavy thematic burdens with grace. Fairytales don’t have such a brutal emphasis on truth; they don’t barbarically force a story to convey what really happened. I began to realize that in the stories I craved, I came to an understanding of truth because of the fantasy, not in spite of it.
When I was in my final semester of college I wanted to write a memoir about what it was like growing up with an addict as a father. House began as a poem describing what crack cocaine does to an addict’s lungs—causes pulmonary alveolar and interstitial edema which, in X-rays, looks like a tree or a blossoming flower.
But after I wrote the poem I realized that the reality of the piece prevented any true feeling. The work felt impotent. In the end, I didn’t want to be trapped by the confines of what had really happened. Memory is fantasy; what we carry with us has little to do with fact, everything to do with feeling. I wanted to demonstrate the ways our desire changes us—how, even if we refute our natures, they will eventually come to collect.
Fairytales are gruesome and bloody. Grandmothers are ripped from the stomachs of wolves and little mermaids are faced with the ultimate question—to what lengths will you go in order to survive? When creating this story that I knew I needed a ruthless medium—a style capable of interrogating the pain that families experience in learning to love each other. Like Cinderella’s sisters cutting off their own toes or the Evil Queen forced to dance herself to death, I wanted to create something that would demonstrate in physical, visceral terms how far we are willing to go in order to belong.
That is what I love about fairytales and why I choose to work with them: they acknowledge the brutality of this world and yet, in their exploration of that violence, they manage to manifest something beautiful. There is magic in the dissonance.