Writing Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

June 14, 2022 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

IVY LODGE by Linda Murphy Marshall (June 14, She Writes Press) is an unforgettable memoir that explores patriarchal households, family dynamics, and writing your own story despite your past.

Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery began as a 10-page essay from a workshop I attended: “Writing About Nowhere.” The assignment was to write about a specific place, describing it in detail. Prior to this workshop, I’d written numerous essays and stories, but my writing tended to be broadly focused. I looked at things from a distance, using large swaths of my writer’s brush to examine them, rather than getting close enough to investigate details.

For my subject, I chose my childhood home: Ivy Lodge. What better place to describe than where I’d spent so many years, I reasoned. This exercise required me to get close, to use all my senses in my writing, to touch, smell, hear, taste, and see what had been right in front of me all along, at the clues left behind, to remember the people with whom I’d lived.

Who am I? How do I fit into my family? Are the words people used to describe me accurate? Did everything happen exactly as they say? Is what they’re saying about the world in which I lived true? How do I know? What are my memories of my life, of my childhood? Do they clash with those of my parents and siblings? How can I arrive at ground truth? Maybe it all needs to be re-examined, using the lens of my translation skills.

Using my experience as a translator, I discovered how to use each room — and the objects in the rooms — to remember events from years gone by. It was as though the walls of the home and their contents were there for me to make sense of, to translate. It was as though Ivy Lodge had retained everything that happened there, as though the house itself had been a witness to my life, to all our lives, waiting to be translated.

The translation process also involved reexamining my parents’ words: what they had said about our family, about me, about our home. I soon realized that the words they used often had little in common with the reality I was living. In the process of translating these words, I learned that what I thought I knew about the years I’d spent at Ivy Lodge had perhaps been a mistranslation, my parents’ translation of our family’s life within Ivy Lodge, not mine. What I thought had been true about me had perhaps been a mistranslation. One such example of this involved their description of Ivy Lodge itself; the stately home was not what it appeared to be on the outside; nor was the family inside what it appeared to be.

One thing led to another and, as I reexamined what I had previously understood to be true about Ivy Lodge, my perceptions changed, along with my self-concept, and the essay eventually grew and grew, until it became a memoir. One memory in one room led to another. One event in one room of Ivy Lodge led to insights about others. One object in a room led to still another memory or insight.

Returning to scenes of my childhood home, to Ivy Lodge, I discovered that, in the past, I’d viewed the house — and myself — primarily through the eyes of my parents, the primary occupants of Ivy Lodge. But following their deaths I was free to make sense of it all by myself, in new ways. Now I was free to translate the events, the words, the silences, the body language, the scenes of my life, to look for meanings, long hidden in many instances.

As I described it in my memoir, the farther you go from your language of origin, the harder it is to understand a foreign language. When I returned to Ivy Lodge with my siblings to sort through the large home following the death of both of our parents, I began to use my skills as a professional translator to sift through memories, to make sense of this once-foreign language and, ultimately, to decipher it. In the process, I set aside my parents’ version of my life, of who I was — their translation, not mine — to create my own version.

The art of translation is the act of converting one thing into another. I translated the rooms of Ivy Lodge, my memories of living there, the objects in the rooms, my role in the family into new meanings independent of a lifelong indoctrination.

Each room uncovered new insights, forgotten scenes, buried memories. I discovered so much about myself when translating my life in Ivy Lodge, acting as a detective in a sense, which is what being a translator sometimes calls for. I gave my past new meaning in the process of writing about Ivy Lodge. I translated my life, my identity, and created a new identity, one independent of my family members’ version.
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IVY LODGE by Linda Murphy Marshall (June 14, She Writes Press) is an unforgettable memoir that explores patriarchal households, family dynamics, and writing your own story despite your past.

After both her parents die, Linda Murphy Marshall, a multi-linguist and professional translator, returns to her midwestern childhood home, Ivy Lodge, to sort through a lifetime of belongings with her siblings. Room by room, she uses her skills as a longtime professional translator to discover new meanings in her former home, and Linda leaves Ivy Lodge with a new realization of who she is and how she fits into her world.

“Ivy Lodge is a brave, beautiful book about the unspoken language of family. Linda Murphy Marshall is unafraid of looking in the dark corners of her childhood home in order to find meaning, peace, and ultimately, light.” —Dawn Raffel, author of The Secret Life of Objects

“Using translation of languages as a metaphor to search for the meaning of family relationships, Linda Murphy Marshall takes the readers on a journey of recollection and compassion to understand her parents. Ultimately, Ivy Lodge is a story of self-discovery through the language of love, written in elegant prose. It is an extraordinary book.” —Allison Hong Merrill, author of Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops: A Memoir

Perfect for fans of other introspective memoirs like I’m the One Who Got Away by Andrea Jarrell, The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom, and Motherwell: A Girlhood by Deborah Orr.

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Linda Murphy Marshall is a multi-linguist and writer with a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literature, a Master’s in Spanish, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Maryland Literary Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bacopa Literary Review, PopMatters, Storgy [UK], The Bark Magazine, Catamaran Literary Reader, and Critical Read,. She was featured in American Writers Review, where she was an Honorable Mention for the 2019 Fiction Contest. She was long-listed in Strands Publishers 2021 International Flash Fiction Contest, and was a finalist in the 2020 Annual Adelaide Literary Contest for one of her essays. In addition, she is currently a reader for Fourth Genre, and a translation editor for the Los Angeles Review. Her sketches and paintings have been featured in art shows and galleries.