Book Report: Geography of Home

31. Akiko Busch, Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live (1999) (6/7/21)

I read this book for a writing seminar I'm about to dive into. The seminar leader loves minute detail, and there is plenty of good detail here. Busch takes on the "geography of home" literally: by exploring the various areas of a house. Starting with the front door—which she deems virtually useless, since where she lives, people always go right round to the back door, or the kitchen door, or through the garage. Right there, my hackles rose, since she was framing the "uselessness" of the front door in universal terms: "we" do not ever use the front door anymore. That "we" does not include me. The front door is the main entrance into my house. Although I did appreciate being reminded of the variety of ways we experience our homes, that wasn't her point.

The short chapters are these: front door, kitchen, dining room, laundry (which she also dismisses, or elides into a "utility room," but no: we have a [tiny] laundry room, even if it's not as elaborate as a Victorian-era one—the Victorians often ending up being a point of comparison, since Busch lives in an old house, with an old floor plan, which evokes the Victorians), closet, home office, library, front porch, bedroom, dressing room (dressing room! I ask you!), bathroom, garage, and living room.

In the end, the book is a confection—slight, sometimes sentimental or cliched. Busch does explore public vs. private space some, and modern desires vs. older ones. (The fact that the book is over 20 years old was occasionally telling.) There is also a distinct sense of privilege (e.g., her mention in the garage chapter of Ranger Rovers and Lexuses in the same breath as "the residents of many Third World countries"—but what about the residents of many American cities?) that I found offputting. I could almost picture the author blithely typing out her thoughts (in her home office, no doubt), one idea to the next, all from her personal experience—though she does try to enlarge the picture by quoting other writers and scholars, and Freud.

One thing I did get from this book is that in 1669 Louis XIV decreed that only knives with rounded tips would be used in the dining room. No bloodshed over dinner! That same chapter also got me googling Victorian forks. Wow!

Here's a passage to give an idea of the writing style:

If there is any part of the home that does not belong exclusively to the people who live there, it is the front door. Whether and how we choose to acknowledge this may say something about the degree of comfort and security we feel inside—and outside—our homes.
     But knowing this doesn't bring me any closer to using my front door. Nor will I eliminate it altogether and replace it with a closet, or anything else more practical. It will instead remain just where it is to remind me that the spaces in a house are layered for a reason. When  you enter a house through the front door, you discover its interiors in a logical progression, passing from public to private realms—front hall, living room, then maybe later, kitchen. The front door is the first step on this journey of progressive congeniality.
     And in our houses, as in our lives, congeniality comes naturally before intimacy. With its white porch and benches, its pale blue ceiling and transom window, my front door will stay just where it is. A small landing where propriety and poetry converge, it will serve perhaps its most important function of all, a brief reminder that there is an interior logic to the way people's houses, like the people themselves, are revealed.

I liked and didn't like this book, both at once. It has the potential to provide food for thought: on how we use our personal spaces, our communal spaces; on where we find comfort; on intimacy: sex in the bedroom, home cooking in the kitchen, heart-to-hearts in the living room; on what things we actually need (why don't old houses have enough closet space?). Et cetera. I'm glad I read it. And that it was short.