The House We Grew Up In
This novel, published in 2013, isn’t Jewell’s most recent: she’s written seven more since it came out. I’ve read and enjoyed many of her books, but hadn’t read this one before—I came across it as an e-book available for download from my local library (a critical resource while sheltering from the 2020 pandemic!) And I’m very glad I did—it mesmerized me. I was literally unable to put it down.
Jewell is known for her character-driven novels, and this one is no exception. We meet the Bird family: flamboyant Lorelei, for whom Easter isn’t complete without an egg hunt and a big dinner, and her passive husband Colin. They’re living in a picturesque cottage in the Cotswolds with their children Meg (the eldest), her sister Beth, and their young twin brothers Rory and Rhys. By the end of the novel you’ll know each of these characters very well. They are finely drawn, idiosyncratic and individual. Motivations and emotions run deep, and that’s what drives the novel.
There’s lots of suspense, created not by a crime or an external threat but by the interplay between characters. We strain to learn just what happened at key points in the past, and what will happen now.
The story unfolds in two timelines. One is in the present, in which we meet Meg—now middle-aged—and her teenage daughter Molly. Lorelei has died. She had become a hoarder, worse than any of them fully realized: the house has become virtually impassible, choked with all the things Lerelei has compulsively crammed into it. Meg and Molly now face the monumental task of clearing everything out. They’ve asked the rest of the family to come home, to help and to attend the funeral, but they’ve all become estranged from each other, spread across the world. Whether the others will show up is a question.
The second timeline is the past. There we see the family members at various times, starting with the early years when Loreleigh and Colin were young parents with young children, and the house was full of activity and liveliness. Easter is a big event every year, with egg hunts on the lawn and a big dinner with roast leg of lamb. This timeline moves forward through the years, taking us through traumatic events and tragedies, hinting at (and finally revealing) secrets the characters can’t acknowledge to each other or even to themselves.
And we have Loreleigh’s own words, written almost up to the time of her death in a set of email messages sent to a man she never meets, though she says she loves him. These messages form a sort of confession—she can explain things to him that she has never faced before. And as she explains, we know we are getting closer to learn about the explosions that drove the family apart.
As I said, I couldn’t put the book down. I fell in love with the characters, and was happy to see that, after all the trauma, it ends on a hopeful note.
I love learning how authors first got published, and Jewell’s story is terrific. She grew up in north London, and though she’d always loved creative writing at school, she had no expectation of being published. At age 28 she’ was let go from her secretarial job. A friend who knew she’d always dreamed of being a writer challenged her to write three chapters of a novel in exchange for dinner at her favourite restaurant. She spent a month writing those three chapters, and on a whim decided to send them to ten literary agents. Nine turned her down. The tenth – the same agent who then represented Kate Atkinson – said she’d like to see the rest of the manuscript. Jewell hadn’t yet written the rest of the manuscript, but she managed to pull it off. That became her first novel, a romantic comedy called Ralph’s Party. It was the best-selling debut novel in the UK in 1999.
Jewell is a prolific writer, who’s now written eighteen novels that have sold over two million copies worldwide. Her early books were at the romantic comedy end of the genre spectrum, but more recently she has moved well into the suspense/thriller space. Her 2019 book was a psychological thriller, The Family Upstairs. Her upcoming novel—Invisible Girl“— is “a taut and white-knuckle thriller.” It’ll be out in August 2020 in the UK, and October in North America.
She still lives in London with her husband, two teenage daughters and three animals. Her Twitter profile says ” I love the dog the best.”
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