Review of Sammie Downing's "The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs”: A Redefinition of the Fairytale
by Sophie Allen and Sarah Feng
Consider a family that lives in the woods, tinged by ferality, distinctly separate from civilization. Consider it layered with a simple, mysterious fantastical element: mothers carry the houses as stitched appendages to their bodies, while their husbands are responsible for the keys that unlock them. Awed, and now full of questions? We are, too – and its poetic frame is part of what differentiates this dazzlingly fragmented novella from novels similarly set in the woods. “The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs,” by Sammie Downing, is set to be released Dec. 18, 2019, by Half-Mystic Press.
The book follows a pair of sisters named Miriam and Essie, who are born to one such family. Periodically moving through the forest in an attempt to escape the tug of the Wild Things, a pack of wolf-like beings that roam the woods, their family struggles with the deteriorating humanity of each parent. As the mother loses her memory with each relocation, the father experiences an increasing desire to give in to his feral side, sometimes taking on the physical and emotional qualities of a wolf.
The world of the novella mixes influences from a broad spectrum of fairy tales, classical literature, and mythical and Biblical allusions. At times, it can feel overwhelming, but it also serves to enrich the story, sustaining and subverting layers of interpretation. Its repertoire of literary heritage centers around vastly different figures who follow vastly different paths, and it frequently complicates how we, as readers, should feel about an event or a character’s actions. We were especially interested in the names of the girls: Esther and Miriam.
The world of the novella mixes influences from a broad spectrum of fairy tales, classical literature, and mythical and Biblical allusions. At times, it can feel overwhelming, but it also serves to enrich the story, sustaining and subverting layers of interpretation.
The name Esther is likely derived from the Old Persian word for star, though it may be a variant on Ishtar, a Babylonian love goddess. In the Book of Esther, one of only two books in the Hebrew Bible that does not mention God, Esther takes her name – whose Hebrew root means “conceal” – to hide her Jewish heritage while part of the Persian king’s harem. The story goes that Esther kept her identity hidden until the king was preparing to issue a decree that mandated the murder of all Jews in Persia, based on an advisor’s recommendation. Esther convinced the king to not commit genocide, and the advisor was killed instead. Whether this is historically accurate is debatable, but it is worth noting that the reason this book doesn’t mention God at all is that human beings take action, and Esther is at the forefront of that.
The Miriam from the Bible, like the Miriam in this novella, is associated with water. In the Book of Exodus, she first appears on a riverbank, and is mentioned by name in “The Song of the Sea,” a poem about the Jewish people crossing the Red Sea safely. As they travel through the desert, Miriam provides water from a miraculous well that does not dry up and goes where they go until Miriam dies. Miriam is a caretaker and a leader, responsible not just for the safety but the emotional well-being of her people.
Downing associates the character Miriam with the responsibility of taking care of her family: as the family structure becomes more fraught with tension, and the mother’s mental wellbeing starts to degenerate, Miriam becomes Essie’s surrogate mother, softening the narrative as she tells it to her sister. Miriam’s relationship with water, too, feels magical. Not only is she keenly aware of its power, seeing her mother’s attempted self-harm in the bathtub, but it’s a healing force, too, for the cauterization of Miriam and Essie’s sisterhood. In this book, bathtubs shed their quotidian significance, becoming the first point of creation of each new house site.
Downing has taken a clever step in creating a strong binary: House and Hollow, man and creature, clean and dirty. While Father loses more and more of himself and his wound festers, Mother continues to attempt to drown herself in the bath.
Downing’s style of writing is highly enjoyable, lending itself naturally to this elevation of the mundane into the mystical. Both laconic and swift, it fuses a sharp, poetical style with a strong, prosaic gravity. Part of what makes the story so surreal, so hazy and magical, is that so many of the images are rooted in scent. There are numerous references to smells that characterize people and places, not only for Father as he grows increasingly Wild, but also for Miriam, who is wrestling with the possibility that she might one day become like him.
The most common smells described in the book are of flowers or rotting carcasses, whose associated memories are equally significant and transformative. Her sensation-focused voice, along with the vignette-like style of the chapters, made it sometimes hard to visualize what was physically occurring on the page, but Downing’s evocative writing helped us focus on the development of the characters, rather than the plot.
To this end, Downing has taken a clever step in creating a strong binary: House and Hollow, man and creature, clean and dirty. While Father loses more and more of himself and his wound festers, Mother continues to attempt to drown herself in the bath.
“The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs” doesn’t fall easily into one interpretation, and we admire this richness. For us, it complicated our understanding of the family unit. Even isolated from the world, societal expectations for women seem to touch Miriam as she toys with a selection of Barbie dolls. As Downing manipulates the fantastical premise of this novella, we found ourselves asking, Where does the power lie within a nuclear family? Where is the origin of a family’s strength? What does ‘home’ mean?
Through the world she has constructed, Downing excavates the effect of generational trauma, where scars are physically inherited as fixtures within a woman’s House, and motherhood is cyclical, as Mother’s memory disintegrates and Miriam assumes a position at the helm of the family’s wellbeing. Although fathers hold the ability to unlock the house with their keys, it’s the women who maintain the meaning of home. This compact novella is an incantatory ode to the resilience of women in the face of a structure that leaves them powerless to control their independence.
This is a piece that doesn’t hesitate to shift its own frame every few pages. Poem, novella, fairytale, parable — this unique story frames our expectations of ourselves and each other in a new, heartbreaking way. Downing has constructed a world in which the role we occupy in other people’s minds and hearts is not only predetermined but actively stifling and painful.
THE FAMILY THAT CARRIED THEIR HOUSE ON THEIR BACKS
By Sammie Downing
84 pp. Half-Mystic Press. $7.00.
Preorder here.
Sophie Allen is a junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the prose editor of COUNTERCLOCK Journal. She does not know how often she should be watering her cactus, but is doing her best. Find her on Twitter at @spiiriitkiid or Instagram at @sallen.jpg.
Sarah Feng is the editor-in-chief of COUNTERCLOCK Journal and the founding director of the COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective. Her works have been recognized by the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom, Teen Vogue, the Academy of American Poets, the Critical Pass Junior Poet Prize, the National Council of Teachers of English, and more. She plays piano and dabbles in charcoals, and she thinks rhythm and light and lyric pulse in every field of the creative arts – if you can call them distinct fields at all. In other words, she has faith in the power of the interdisciplinary arts and their persistence in our memories and minds.