You don’t Find Home. Home Finds You

By Roz Morris

I’d lived in my London house for thirty years. Originally I arrived there bewildered and reckless, moving in with a man I’d known for one week, and the house kept asking: Are you sure? Do you belong here? 

Decades later, we were still happily there. The house was the keeper of our history, the witness of our work, the cocoon of our lives together. But one day we decided we’d outgrown the city. It was time to move to the country.

We were prepared for logistics, lists and legal stuff. We gritted our teeth for decluttering and strategic distribution of cushions. But finding a house to move to? Welcome to a world of estate agents you can never quite trust. Oh, and the romcom rules. What are those? You’re looking for ‘the right one’, and you meet the seller who plays the field and won’t commit. Also the goofy oddity (how many loos does one house need?).  The house with excess baggage (an annexe, a whole extra house you don’t want, decorated badly because its current owners also didn’t want it). The well-bred eccentric – charming as hell, hell to live in. And the fallback – the house that keeps coming back to you, which you don’t really want but seriously consider. 

But as we criss-crossed from city to country and back again, we began to ask deeper, more tender questions. What makes a home? How do we find it? What does home mean? What parts of home linger with us long after we’ve left and perhaps shape who we are for the rest of our lives? 

Our househunting journey was nothing less than a procession of sliding doors, throwing dice for the future, all the metaphors. As we searched I found I also wanted to examine other places that had been significant in my life and how they came to me, or to my friends and family. The memoir evolved into an exploration of love, belonging, arriving, leaving, old ghosts, new settlings, absurd adventures, utter chance and what we do with the cards we’re given. And most of all, how home – our guardian, our shelter, our all – comes to us from happenstance and chance, as if we have to earn it by passing tests from fate. One reviewer said ‘I was chuckling along in recognition, then unexpectedly I’d find my eyes full of tears’.

It’s called Turn Right At The Rainbow: A Diary of Househunting, Happenstance & Home and it releases on 5 March. 

Would you like to take part in a bonkers art project?

To celebrate the launch of the book, I’ve been making a crowd-art project. I’m inviting the internet –you – to write the word ‘home’ on something. Write it on anything you like – a corner of wrapping paper, a cardboard box, a shopping list, the back of an envelope, a sketch, a pebble, a hand.  

Use any language you like: English, Welsh, Urdu, emojis, musical notation, Elvish. Runes. 

Use any style: cursive, all caps, careful, messy, wrong-handed. Spell it out in cat nibbles

Take a picture of it and email it to me (rozmorriswriter at gmail dotcom) with the subject line HOME COLLAGE. Or load it onto Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, LinkedIn and tag me.

I hope to collect the word ‘home’ in a whole world of hands and languages and styles. Because home is different for all of us, with a back story as unique as our handwriting, our knick-knacks, the idioms we pick up from our travels both real and imaginary. 

What would you write ‘home’ on?

Turn Right At The Rainbow: A Diary of Househunting, Happenstance & Home

Releases on 5 March.

Poignant and charming… few books pull me along in a single sitting. I devoured this in one long train journey.’ David Bodanis, bestselling author The Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency In A World Turned Mean.

You don’t find home. Home finds you.

Roz has lived in her London house for thirty years. She arrived there bewildered and reckless, moving in with a man she’d known for one week, and the house kept asking: Are you sure? Do you belong here? Now, decades later, it’s the keeper of her history, her work and her life with Dave. But now they’ve decided to leave the city.

With sharp wit and genuine curiosity, Roz explores the deep resonance of place and memory: how a house is built on layers of happenstance, how it holds the ghosts of previous owners, and how we come to know it like our own limbs. From estate agents’ slippery tricks to the strange archaeology of attics, from the sounds that tell us we’re home to the leap of faith required to start again somewhere new, this is a book about stuff and nonsense, love and junk, the old kingdom and the new —and the ways our homes shape us as much as we shape them.

By turns hilarious and unexpectedly moving, Turn Right At The Rainbow is creative non‑fiction that reads like a novel. It’s for readers of memoir who crave heart as much as humour, as well as those who scroll property listings just for nosiness. Above all, it’s a quest for the miraculous moment when somewhere alien becomes ‘home’.

Preorder https://books2read.com/rightrainbow

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Roz Morris is an award-winning novelist whose work explores identity, imagination and the places that make us. She has sold 4 million books as a ghostwriter, teaches masterclasses for The Guardian and has helped thousands of writers through her Nail Your Novel books. Find her full gamut here https://rozmorris.org/

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing