Nostalgia’s
gotten a bad name, but I think it’s one of the most important literary
emotions. The Greek word nostalgia
means pain for home, longing for home, and that’s what I experienced yesterday
morning, the morning of our fiftieth wedding anniversary.
Early
that morning my wife and I and Caitrine (who’d come from St. Louis) and Rachel (who’d
come from Chicago) and the dog (who came from the animal shelter) walked over
to our old house on Prairie Street, now the home of our middle daughter,
Heather, and her family. We loved that old house and couldn’t have sold it to
anyone other than a daughter. My wife and I lived there for over thirty years.
Our daughters grew up in that house, which we bought for $18,500 in 1970. Two
of our dogs lived out their lives in that house.
When
I need a house in a novel, this is the house that comes to mind. I find it
almost impossible to imagine any other house, hard to imagine a house without a
Baccarat crystal chandelier in the dining room, and so on.
My
editor’s assistant at Bloomsbury had asked me on Friday how many more books I
thought I had in me. I didn’t know. I had just emailed a novella called The Truth About Death to my agent that
morning, and my agent had reminded me, almost instantly, that nothing is harder
to sell than a novella. But then on Saturday morning I thought, maybe I could
write a novel about the house on Prairie Street. But then I thought, I’d
already written that novel; I’d better think of something else.