About the book

Young Miriam is born into a world where women carry houses stitched to their backs, while men carry keys with the power to unlock them. Miriam’s nomadic family moves from clearing to clearing within a dark wood, but no matter how deep into the forest they travel, the haunted calls of Wild Things follow. As precious family heirlooms disappear and Father roams through the woods later and later into the night, Mother slowly loses her memory and Miriam begins to understand that her family might not be as human as it appears.

The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs is a modern fairytale that interrogates the trauma embodied by mothers, inherited by daughters, and patterned in our walls, chests, and feet.

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Advance praise

“The Family that Carried Their House on Their Backs is a magical story and a family story; its magic evolves from its unfaltering attention to how family—as captivity, as inheritance—can feel. Sammie Downing rediscovers the pure facts of love and and wildness in the spare, strange folklore through which her characters set out. A wise and stunning novella of intense tenderness about the permanence that dwells inside our transience and the wilderness that lives within our homes.” —Mark Mayer, author of Aerialists

“In this beguiling family romance, a daughter asks her father, ‘how do you know what you’re looking at in the mirror?’ Her question haunts a darkly beautiful fairy tale of a migrant family moving from place to place in an endless wood, told with cheekiness and wit, with a surprise hiding in every exchange between child and parent, human and Wild Thing, House and home. Luxurious and raw, attuned to the wounds in nature that are also wounds in us, Sammie Downing’s debut displays an uncanny power, like the family at its center, ‘to wring music from your bones.’” —Joshua Corey, author of Hannah and the Master and How Long Is Now

“This is one of my favorite pieces ever written. It’s as tender as a bruise. It’s light and murky and beautiful as nighttime mist descending on a forest. It’s whimsical yet slightly acrid. It is courageous and raw and unsentimental. A heartbreaking portrait of sisters and mothers. This story brings me to my knees.” —Kaisa Cummings, author of Home Remedies 

“Mother restarts her memory. Father balances precariously between two worlds. Meanwhile, sisters Miriam and Essie struggle with their parents’ sometimes devastating imperfections and what it means to grow up, grow apart, and grow together. In these ghostly bites of prose, Sammie Downing gives us glimpses through windowpanes to the unsettling world of Houses and Hollows, Wild Things and severed keys, and sisters mirrored.” —Emily Capettini, author of Thistle

Press & reader reviews

“Consider a family that lives in the woods, tinged by ferality, distinctly separate from civilization. Consider it layered with a simple, mysterious fantastical element: mothers carry the houses as stitched appendages to their bodies, while their husbands are responsible for the keys that unlock them. Awed, and now full of questions? We are, too—and its poetic frame is part of what differentiates this dazzlingly fragmented novella from novels similarly set in the woods. … The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs doesn’t fall easily into one interpretation, and we admire this richness. As Downing manipulates the fantastical premise of this novella, we found ourselves asking, where does the power lie within a nuclear family? Where is the origin of a family’s strength? What does ‘home’ mean? Through the world she has constructed, Downing excavates the effect of generational trauma, where scars are physically inherited as fixtures within a woman’s House, and motherhood is cyclical, as Mother’s memory disintegrates and Miriam assumes a position at the helm of the family’s wellbeing. Although fathers hold the ability to unlock the house with their keys, it’s the women who maintain the meaning of home. 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. This is a piece that doesn’t hesitate to shift its own frame every few pages. Poem, novella, fairytale, parable—this unique story frames our expectations of ourselves and each other in a new, heartbreaking way. Downing has constructed a world in which the role we occupy in other people’s minds and hearts is not only predetermined but actively stifling and painful.” A review by Sophie Allen and Sarah Feng for Counterclock Lit

“Magic and reality stumble over themselves and each other, like the two girls haunted by their lineage. I think that’s what makes a good fairytale—as one is ‘passed through an alternate dimension to create the other’ and as speaking to one, you ‘speak to the other backwards,’ you cannot find separation between them. How is a story not already a memory? How can you have an hourglass of magic without reality also slipping through? The story flickers from the present tense into glimpses of the future, like seeing ashes on the ground then looking right back over at the house it was. … I found myself growing then cutting myself down with every observation of daughters turning into mothers, the choices that neither one of them will ever admit to making. Halfway through the story, I thought of how unmagical, how unreal, reality really is. I lined up all the knives and placed them next to all the hips. This story brought out a strange sense of woman in me. It’s more than a story about family or home or any of the things we think we belong to. 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.” A review by River Adams for Oh Shadows

“Haunting, visceral, and tightly woven—this novella is deeply rich in both atmosphere and substance. Dark in mood and lush in texture, it gets under your skin and cuts right to the bone.” A review by Lauren Julia

“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.” An essay by Sammie Downing for the Half Mystic blog

“A story about the internal duality between rootedness and freedom, wildness and home, Sammie Downing asks us: ‘What does it mean to choose a life?’ Downing has a skill for making the material and symbolic world blend into one another. Physical objects become memories, suturing themselves to bodies, heavy and hard to discard. Downing captures the burden of things. The weight of the objects that remind us of the lives we chose. Located in some other time and place, but also right here and now, Downing weaves together a world worth visiting. This little novella, full of tenderness and sisterly love, will stay with you.” A review by Emmett

“What I loved about House was the way family was examined. On one hand, it evokes such a nostalgia, how it makes the reader reflect on their own childhood—the good, but also the bad. In a way, it’s also a disillusionment of childhood: the small terrors we face as children, without even realising it; how fearless we are when we’re young and don’t know all the horrors of the world. On the other hand, it shows all the little things parents teach their children without realising it, either; it shows the way we are created through even the tiniest of actions our parents take. For me, House is a story about growing up, about losing the innocence of being young and turning into an adult, making difficult decisions and taking responsibility for them—even though, sometimes, it’s not fair to have to make these kinds of decisions. … 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? I also loved the opposites Sammie Downing presented in this book: Miriam and Essie, so different from each other despite growing up beside the other one. Another opposite is civilisation vs. nature: what does it take to turn human into beast, Father into Wild Thing? How do we change if we leave all our rules behind?” A review by Hannah Rosenthal for Ink & Myths

“This beautiful little novella contains so much more than one might think. Each page turns like a key, unlocking a door in our internal, personal architecture. Downing is a more than able guide through this labyrinth, showing us the knots and crevices of joy that can exist even in the most desolate passages.” A review by Jacob

“This book was immediately engrossing. Equally magical and dreamlike, but with incredible realism that resonated with memories of familial pain and loss. I can’t recommend this book enough, especially its portrayal of the complicated lives we live alongside our families.” A review by Erin Roberts

“This book carries a weight that will leave you mining your own soul for what you left unexamined in its nooks and crannies. It’s visceral, it’s beautiful, it’s perfect.” A review by Jessica Broom

“While there is a certain closure at the end of the novella, it is by no means a rigid tale that resists its own interpretation or extension beyond the official end by its readers. It is a novel about growing up but in a different vein than the fantastical adventures of Wendy Darling, Alice, Dorothy, and the like. In The Family That Carried a House on Their Backs, the dream world is not so much the escape from reality as much as it is the dark and enticing underbelly of it that some can’t help but succumb. … Much of Miriam’s behaviour and her thoughts resonated with both my past- and present-self. I found a sense of faith and comfort, for no matter how complex, and at times problematic, the relationships between mothers and daughters and sisters are, Downing shows us that it is these very relationships that 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.” A review by Margaryta Golovchenko for Anomaly Lit

“I didn’t want to build this world within reality because, in the end, belief in reality is belief in fantasy. What I remember and what my mother remembers are two different universes. I wanted this novella to feel like a story passed down for generations until the truth of what happened begins to feel like myth.” An interview with Sammie Downing for the Half Mystic blog

“The surreal, mythological voice made this novella utterly unlike anything I’ve read in quite some time. It is wild and powerful in all the most skilled, emotionally wrenching ways.” A review by Courtney

“Amazingly poetic and transporting. I was so impressed by the beauty of this novella that I consciously slowed down and read each word carefully, like a long poem or like a delicious meal that you don’t want to end. This is something I rarely am moved to do while reading, as I am not a fast reader already by I found myself wanting to slowly and quietly step and linger in this world. It was truly one of the best fiction books I’ve read in a while.” A review by Leah Rich

“This one hit. My mom and I have had a stressed relationship for much of my life. It’s gotten better, but the smiles she saves for me usually have a foundation of sadness. A smile filled with water. This book cracked open all that.” A review by Molly

“This book hit in a lot of emotional places for me. Much of Miriam and Essie’s journey throughout this book felt familiar despite it being fantasy, but that’s what the best fantasy does. … More than anything, I want to hold Miriam and Essie close by and make sure nothing bad ever happens to them because they are so precious and sweet and young and even with what Miriam experiences in the book and begins to understand, I still want to protect her from the world. Too bad even in this book world, little girls don’t get to stay that way for long. … If you’re looking for an intriguing fantasy story—that might punch you in the heart—I definitely recommend checking this out.” A review by Sarah Perchikoff for Bookish Rantings

About the author

The poet Ed Roberson once told Sammie Downing, “You only have one life and you only have one work.” She’s taken this advice perhaps too literally and has lived in seven states and two countries. She’s been a housekeeper, a huntress and a fraud investigator. Currently, she resides in Denver, Colorado. She looks forward to her next adventure.

Reader & launch photos