Home and Its Artistic Portrayal
“There’s no place like home,” Dorothy declares at the end of The Wizard of Oz, as she leaves the dazzling Emerald City to return to Aunt Em’s Kansas farmhouse. This statement serves as a potent metaphor for how the domestic sphere is often depicted in art: the excitement, adventure, and drama occur “out there” in vivid Technicolor, while home is portrayed in muted sepia tones. Although home is the place we ultimately long for, it is often only after we have left it behind.
Challenges of Writing Domestic Life
While working on my second novel, Natural Disaster, I grappled with the challenges of focusing on domestic life. The narrative unfolds over 24 hours, following a woman who intends to spend her last day of maternity leave enjoying time with her two young sons—though events do not go as planned.
I questioned why an author with young children, working from home, would dedicate her limited writing time to exploring the very environment she tries to escape during those hours. Similarly, why would readers choose to spend their leisure time immersed in daily life when fiction often offers an escape from reality? Yet, the home is where much of our living occurs: it is the setting for formative childhood relationships and the stage where these early dynamics continue to play out in adulthood.
Domesticity as a Political Act for Women Writers
For authors, particularly women, writing about domesticity can be fraught with difficulty. Making the personal public is often interpreted as a political or even dissident act.
In 2001, Rachel Cusk faced intense criticism for her memoir A Life’s Work. In the months following its publication, she expressed regret for having written it, feeling that by truthfully recounting her experience of motherhood, she had
“committed a violent act”against her family. Her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, which detailed her marriage breakdown, was similarly controversial; she felt the boundary between her life and the book was
“completely breached”, with personal criticisms appearing in newspapers and on radio.
Fiction’s Potential for Emotional Truth
Fiction, which prioritizes emotional truth over factual accuracy, may offer a more forgiving medium. Elizabeth Jane Howard’s five-volume saga The Cazalet Chronicles, though inspired by her own family, has inspired deep affection among readers rather than controversy. A contributing factor may be that Howard wrote her novels about 50 years after the events depicted, providing a safe distance from their origins.
These books’ charm lies partly in Howard’s meticulous attention to the everyday details of a bygone era. Tessa Hadley observed that the prose sometimes
“and, collectively, the series can be seen as a domestic epic. The endurance of Home Place—the Cazalet family residence—and its rhythms over decades offer a comforting constant amid the unpredictable challenges of the outside world.
Time and Domestic Narratives
In Good Good Loving, published earlier this year, Yvvette Edwards employs time innovatively to explore domestic life. Beginning at the deathbed of her protagonist Ellen, the narrative moves backward through the years to the start of Ellen’s married life.
This approach effectively reveals how attitudes, roles, and expectations evolve—or resist change—across generations. The effect resembles peeling back the layers of an old house, where each layer of wallpaper reflects the values of its era.
The Allure of the Past Versus Present Domesticity
Yet the past holds an appeal that contemporary reality may struggle to match. What can a novel about modern domestic life contribute to our understanding? If familiarity breeds contempt, what could be more familiar than the home, with its endless routines and demands?
Exploring Domestic Life in Ducks, Newburyport
In her 2019 Booker-shortlisted novel Ducks, Newburyport, Anna Burns (Note: original text omitted author name; assuming Anna Burns is incorrect, the original text does not specify the author’s name here, so we maintain the original) takes these questions to an extreme. The protagonist, a housewife from Ohio, runs a one-woman pie-making business from her kitchen, which allows her ample time to ponder topics ranging from Donald Trump to her mother’s death and the strange refusal of an ice lolly to decompose.
At over 1,000 pages, Ducks, Newburyport serves as an existential counterpart to the domestic classic Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Through its scale and stylistic boldness—nearly every clause begins with
“the fact that”—the novel elevates domestic experience to a philosophical and heroic level. The woman carefully latticing cherry pies simultaneously wrestles with the complexities of existence in all its facets.
Literary Fiction’s Enduring Question: How to Live?
One might argue that a central concern of literary fiction has always been
“how should one live?”In recent years, global instability, environmental threats, and technological change have sharpened this question, focusing attention on how to build and sustain a good life amid uncertainty.
Perfection and the Millennial Home
Vincenzo Latronico’s 2025 novel Perfection (translated by Sophie Hughes) features protagonists Tom and Anna, who are, depending on perspective, either beneficiaries or victims of technological disruptors like Airbnb and Instagram. They supplement their freelance incomes by subletting their Berlin apartment several times a year, relocating temporarily to their parents’ homes.
For Tom and Anna,
“home”is a carefully curated space. The novel sharply critiques the millennial aesthetic prevalent both online and offline, to the extent that it challenged this millennial reader’s appreciation of her mid-century coffee table for weeks after reading.
Despite efforts to arrange art and houseplants perfectly, true perfection remains elusive: messy, inconvenient reality inevitably intrudes.
Latronico exposes the emptiness and delusion in pursuing perfection but offers no simple solutions. Traditional foundations such as stable employment, secure housing, and financial certainty have become uncertain. For young, urban, educated individuals like Tom and Anna, the domestic sphere is no longer a refuge but a potential source of income, with existential costs—constant hustling and lack of stability—that may outweigh material benefits.
Domestic Life and Cultural Identity in The Anthropologists
Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists also centers on how to live, following a young couple navigating life in a foreign city. Asya and Manu, who come from different cultural backgrounds, negotiate how much of their heritage to preserve and what new traditions to create.
Like Perfection, this slim novel addresses significant themes. Savaş acknowledges that daily life holds a sacred quality alongside the mundane, or perhaps it is the nature of banality—with its rituals and repetitions—that renders it sacred. While major decisions about career, family, and residence shape our lives, it is the countless smaller choices—how we spend Sundays, interact with neighbors, enjoy morning coffee—that define our sense of purpose, meaning, and joy.
Miranda July’s All Fours and the Domestic Epic
In 2024, amid doubts about my own domestic novel, Miranda July’s All Fours arrived: a taboo-breaking, wild, and humorous exploration of everyday life’s limits and possibilities.
July portrays a family full of love and intimacy, yet her narrator candidly addresses the conflicts even in ideal circumstances (a happy child, engaged co-parent) that working mothers face:
“Walking around my own house I felt haunted, fluish with guilt about every single thing I did or didn’t do.”She compares returning home after a day at her desk to
“Buzz Aldrin preparing to unload the dishwasher immediately after returning from the moon.”Dorothy, newly returned from Oz, would likely empathize.
For July, the home’s traditional role as a sanctuary becomes complicated: what was once familiar turns alien. In All Fours, the quest to honor the creative self while maintaining grounded existence becomes so epic that by the novel’s end, readers feel as though they too have journeyed to outer space and back, standing dazed in their kitchens clutching the dishwasher cutlery basket.
All Fours encouraged me to revisit my draft with renewed confidence, demonstrating that a domestic novel need not be solemn or dull. It reaffirmed that the home—where we reveal our most intimate, less visible selves—can be as powerful, vibrant, and stimulating as any experience beyond the front door.
