Emma Sloley: THE BIG WARM HOUSE • Craft Essay

Emma Sloley
THE BIG WARM HOUSE: An Essay on the Art of Becoming a Writer

I’m thinking of a particular house, a house whose characteristics vary but whose essential nature remains unchanged. Let’s call it The Big Warm House. I’m not saying this very literary house is benign, necessarily. In some stories, the warmth is a trick, a fatal illusion from which the protagonist must eventually flee. The walls are so thin you can hear every burst of laughter or weeping, or else they’re as thick as a medieval prison. The size is also unreliable. You might assume a big house implies wealth, a certain level of bourgeois status, comfort. But sometimes the house is big because it has had to expand to contain all the terrible secrets.

As a baby bookworm, I spent hours out of sight and hearing of my family, tucked away in some dusty corner of the house, frantically reading as if words were a finite resource and I was close to finishing my ration. I was a slightly odd child, not eccentric enough to be noteworthy, just slightly withdrawn and socially awkward, waiting to grow into my forehead and teeth and the colt-like legs my sisters and I all inherited. My favorite books were about houses. Well, they were ostensibly about the people who lived in the houses, but it was in the corners of the houses that the true drama lived.

I appreciated the cursed fantasy world of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, but secretly I was far more interested in the wonderfully gloomy house through which the children entered that world. They had the run of the place without any functional grown-up interference, which struck me as the height of decadence. Though the descriptions of the décor were sparse (I mean, everyone was eager to get to Narnia, understandably), I loved reading about the faded English splendor of the rooms, the gardens, an oak wardrobe big enough in which to get truly lost.

Children’s literature has no shortage of great houses: the chaotic, come one-come-all cheeriness of the Weasley’s Burrow in Harry Potter; the Moominhouse in Tove Jansson’s enchantingly oddball Moomintroll series; the cabin in the Little House on the Prairie books, which in spite of the titular adjective doesn’t feel small at all. Even Bilbo Baggins’ house, though diminutive, fits the paradigm: the hobbit hole from Lord of the Rings is a source of hospitality and comfort, an ad-hoc meeting place for the community where there’s always a kettle on and a pipe to be smoked (if you’re into that kind of thing).

I loved the escape these fictional homes provided, but I also thrilled to their familiarity. I had no trouble imagining the big warm house because reading about it transported me there; I lived inside those houses. My real family’s ramshackle Edwardian family home was a warren of oddly-shaped rooms and surprise doors, of chimneys that went nowhere and chimneys so cavernous the cat sometimes got stuck in them, her plaintive mewling reverberating eerily through the walls. It was a place of dinner parties that never seemed to start or end. Of projects never quite finished, test swatches of paint on walls and windows propped open with books. As a child, I learned early that the temporary can become permanent.

Perhaps that’s partly why I felt an instant kinship when I encountered characters like Cassandra and Rose Mortmain from Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. We didn’t bathe in the kitchen sink, but we weren’t too far off during the many years in which our house was a DIY work-in-progress, our lives a kind of architectural progressive dinner party. Each of us—my parents, me, my three sisters— would live in a room designated our own until the time came to renovate it, then we’d move into another room, and so on until normal meant camp beds in the corner of the lounge room, a piano in the bedroom, piles of scuffed shoes in the walk-in pantry. There were always raucous communal meals and a stream of visitors, and plenty of suitors came to call, even if they were never for me.

Like the ill-fated Berry family of John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire, I grew into adolescence nodding knowingly at the many iterations of the titular hotel because the salient aspects of that life felt familiar: how frustrating to mark out a territory as one of multiple siblings; how bourgeois ideals of normality could warp a child’s developing identity; how the roof under which you all lived could come to feel like both sanctuary and prison. All those early Irving sagas—The Water-Method Man, The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Cider House Rules—to some degree fixated on houses as a locus of comfort, desire, and betrayal; the bricks-and-mortar manifestation of a hero’s longing for home always too slippery to grasp.

The big warm house represents a bulwark against that pressure, but of course bricks and mortar are no defense against a civilization in peril. Houses might represent civilization, but they are also the first totems of civilization to fall.

During my Brontë years, I loved Jane Eyre madly, but I loved Rochester’s house even more. Even a literal madwoman in an attic can’t dampen the dangerous romance of a home in which you could lose yourself both literally and figuratively. This is the big warm house as liminal space. Standing on the threshold, the reader is suspended between two worlds. Ahead of you, a life of fulfillment and happiness glimpsed through a golden crack in the parlor door; behind, the cold loneliness of the moors where pariahs are doomed to wander forever. Visiting Wuthering Heights was even more treacherous. On the one hand, the promise of a roaring hearth fire and some juicy gossip: on the other, melodramatic ghosts and a host who’s extremely fucked-up, emotionally speaking.

Later, I developed an appreciation of the houses under whose roofs Edith Wharton’s gilded unfortunates played out their fates. They were more like big cold houses, their opulence and prestige a poor trade-off for the chilly inhospitality and betrayals that took place within. There was a constant stream of visitors—a classic hallmark of the big warm house—but chief among the visitors was class anxiety, who always proved a total bitch to evict. The only way to escape those rooms was via death, either social or literal. But they were so lavish and beautiful, the time spent there was almost worth it!

The big warm house doesn’t have to be a mansion. In Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, the “residence” is a ramshackle lot called the Pit in danger of being swept away in a hurricane, but it’s nevertheless where familial love and loyalty live, at least temporarily. Abject poverty is recast as a chance to catch up with the whole fam in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where Charlie’s home is both a haven and a disturbingly privacy-free zone. In Anne Enright’s The Gathering, the Irish working-class family home is a fulcrum around which its many damaged members revolve, a place where siblings can’t seem to help returning even when they know grief awaits, because something else lives there too—the chance to forgive one another and oneself.

In life, I crave the comfort of the big warm house, but I also need to get away from its demands in order to write. I think many writers are like this, building the house into their stories instead of trying to live in it. To properly capture home, we must leave.

Before I’d even put pen to paper to write my first novel, Disaster’s Children, the fictional house was already built, existing even before my characters did. I knew the survivalist ranch on which these people lived would be a wonder of design, because they were building a utopia, and utopias are always beautiful. The main house is both an architectural triumph and a convivial gathering place. How could a utopia exist if it didn’t involve the comfort of walking through chilly woods at dusk and spotting the golden glow of a house wavering through the trees? The promise of camaraderie, of food and drink, of refuge, of people who finally understand you, of rest.

My stories are often about a world coming apart. The big warm house represents a bulwark against that pressure, but of course bricks and mortar are no defense against a civilization in peril. Houses might represent civilization, but they are also the first totems of civilization to fall. Houses can be flattened, burned down, bombed, swept away. They can squash witches, sure, but they can in turn be squashed. Marlo, the protagonist of Disaster’s Children, understands on some cellular level that in order to become her best and truest self she needs to flee the binds of the ranch, her beloved big warm house.

The thing I believe writers (and perhaps also readers) need to know about the big warm house is that it’s built on a foundation of contradiction. Everyone who lives inside must crave solitude but instead find themselves bumping up against furniture, beds, each other, themselves. They must be forced into intimacy and driven apart by failing to understand one another. The fictional house must always be full of people but also profoundly lonely. The house must represent safety but also danger—a waystation between two worlds, though never exposing in which direction lies folly and which salvation. Most importantly, the inhabitants of the story house must be torn between desperately wanting to get away, and wanting never to leave.

Emma Sloley’s work has appeared in Catapult, Literary Hub, Yemassee Journal, and the Masters Review Anthology, among many others. She is a MacDowell fellow and her debut novel, Disaster’s Children, was published by Little A books in 2019. Born in Australia, Emma divides her time between the US and the city of Mérida, Mexico. You can find her on Twitter @Emma_Sloley and visit her website to learn more. Her novel can be purchased via BookShop.