‘TeaThere’s no place like home,” Dorothy announces at the end of The Wizard of Oz, as she departs from the dazzling Emerald City for Auntie Em’s Kansas farmhouse. It’s a powerful metaphor for the way the domestic sphere is often depicted in art: the action, adventure and drama take place “there” in brilliant Technicolor, with the home rendered by contrast in cool sepia tones. Home may be the place we ultimately yearn for, but only once we’ve left it behind.
While working on my second novel, Natural Disaster, I was struck from time to time by the potential dangers of putting home life front and center. The story spans 24 hours, following a woman who plans to spend some quality time with her two young boys on her last day of maternity leave (spoiler: it doesn’t go as planned).
Why – I kept asking myself – would a writer with young children, who works from home, spend those precious few hours of her writing time in the same environment she is trying to avoid for those same precious few hours? Indeed, why would a reader choose to spend even more of their precious leisure time delving into daily life, when a major selling point of fiction is its ability to help you escape or go beyond reality? And yet, what could be more compelling? Home is where we spend most of our lives: it is where our most formative relationships are formed as children, and it is the area where early dynamics unfold in later years.
However, for writers, and especially women, writing about domesticity offers a particularly frightening prospect: making personal information public is certainly interpreted as a political, if not actively dissident, act.
In 2001, Rachel Cusk received such intense criticism for her memoir A Life’s Work that in the months following its publication she “continued to regret” that she had written it. By telling the truth about her experience of motherhood, she felt she had “committed a violent act” against her family. Her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, which details the breakdown of her marriage, was hardly less controversial: she found that the divide between her life and the book had “completely broken down”, with criticism of her private life appearing in newspapers and broadcast on the radio.
Fiction, where emotional truth is valued more than fact, can provide a more forgiving medium. Elizabeth Jane Howard’s five-volume saga The Cazalet Chronicles, although based on Howard’s own family, provoked adoration rather than anger in its readers. It certainly helped that (unlike Cusk) Howard was writing 50 years after the first novel was set, safely removed from the heat of its inspiration.
Part of the remarkable charm of these books is the keen attention Howard paid to the daily routines of a bygone era. Tessa Hadley commented that the prose sometimes “Reads like a hymn to household management”, and overall, the entire project can be characterized as a domestic epic, where the endurance of the home place (aptly named the Cazalet Family Residence) and its rhythms over the decades provide a solace against the random challenges of the outside world.
In good love, Published earlier this year, Yvette Edwards also uses time very effectively in navigating the domestic sphere. Starting from the deathbed of his protagonist Ellen, Edwards’ story moves through the years to the beginning of Ellen’s married life.
This innovative approach elegantly shows how attitudes, roles and expectations change (and don’t change) between generations: the effect is like peeling back the walls of an old house, each layer of wallpaper a testament to the customs of its age.
But the past has a charm that current reality may struggle to achieve. What could a novel possibly add to our knowledge of contemporary domestic life? If familiarity breeds contempt, what could be more familiar than home, with its mundane routines and demands?
In her 2019 Booker-shortlisted novel Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellman takes up these questions and runs an ultramarathon with them. Ellman’s heroine, an Ohio housewife, operates a one-woman pie-making business from her kitchen, giving her unlimited time to think, ponder, and speculate about everything from Donald Trump to her mother’s death and her refusal to let ice lollies disintegrate.
At over 1,000 pages, Dux, Newburyport serves as the existential counterpart to another domestic titan: Mrs. Beaton’s Household Management Book. In writing a work of such scale and stylistic audacity (almost every section begins with “the fact”), Ellman transforms the domestic experience into a philosophical, heroic one: the woman methodically making pastry on a cherry pie is grappling with existence in all its light and shadow at the same time.
It could be argued that the basic concern of literary fiction has always been “How should one live?”, but in recent years, global instability, environmental collapse, and the threat of technological revolution have brought the problem of how to create and maintain a good life. all this In sharper focus.
In Vincenzo Latronico’s 2025 hit Perfection (translated by Sophie Hughes), protagonists Tom and Anna are, depending on your point of view, beneficiaries or victims of technological disruptions like Airbnb and Instagram. A few times a year they supplement their freelance income by renting out their Berlin apartment, packing up their laptops and visiting their parents for the weekend or holidays.
For Tom and Anna, “home” is a carefully crafted environment — the novel so accurately portrays the millennial aesthetic ubiquitous on IG and IRL that this millennial had a hard time looking at their mid-century coffee table in the eyes for weeks after reading. But no matter how impeccably we craft our artwork, or artfully arrange our house plants, true perfection is unattainable: messy, inconvenient real life always gets in the way.
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Latronico exposes how hollow and misleading the pursuit of perfection is, but he has no easy answers. The building blocks that were previously taken for granted (a steady job, reliable housing, financial security) have most likely become uncertain. For young, urban, educated people like Tom and Anna, the domestic sphere is no longer a welcome return, but another potential revenue source whose existential costs (always hustling, never fixed) risk exceeding the material benefits.
This concern with how to live now is also at the center of Aysegul Savas’s The Anthropologist, which shows another young couple making their way in a foreign city. For Asiya and Manu, who do not share a common heritage, domestic life is about how much of their cultures they have to preserve, and what they have to invent for themselves.
Like Perfection, it is a slim novel, but its concerns are weighty. Savage believes that daily life has a sacred quality to the ordinary as well, or perhaps it is the nature of ordinariness – with its rituals and repetitions – that makes it inherently sacred. We are all faced with a few major choices (career, family, where to settle), but it is the infinite smaller choices – how we spend our Sundays, how we connect with our neighbors, how we have our morning coffee – that shape our sense of purpose, meaning, and joy in the world.
In 2024, when I was beset by doubts about the progress of my own domestic novel, Miranda’s All Four of July crashed onto my desk: a taboo, wild, and fun fantasy about testing the limits and boundaries of everyday life.
July depicts a family unit that is full of love and intimacy, yet her narrator does not shy away from the best-case scenario (happy child, co-parenting) conflict that can arise in working mothers: “Walking around my house I felt haunted, filled with guilt about things I did or didn’t do.” She compares re-entering the house after spending a day at her desk to “Buzz Aldrin preparing to unload the dishwasher immediately after returning from the moon.” Dorothy, recently returned from Australia, can certainly empathize.
For July, the home’s traditional function as a paradise becomes complicated: what was originally familiar becomes foreign. In All Force she turns this question into such an epic exploration of how to honor the creative self while maintaining an earthly existence that, by the end of the novel, it feels as if we too have gone into outer space and come back, standing stunned in our kitchen, holding a basket of dishwasher cutlery.
all four Enabled me to confront my own draft again, armed with strong evidence that a domestic novel need not be study or quiet or any other euphemism for being boring; And a new understanding that home – where we are our most intimate, least observed selves – can be as powerful, vibrant and stimulating an environment as anything we might find outside the front door.
