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I SPENT last week in my parents’ home. It is not a house I grew up in — they moved there when I was in my early 20s — yet it still feels like somewhere I belong.
I savour the steady rhythms of their household, where TV is watched as it is scheduled and evening meals happen at roughly the same time and are never throwntogether fridge-raiding affairs.
But what I do find challenging about going home is not reverting to an older version of my teen self. My parents are elderly, I should be doing the heavy lifting, but my mother runs such a tight ship, it is easy to let yourself be looked after.
Plenty of adults have returned home for family gatherings this Easter. With all the provocations, tensions, simmering resentments, laughter and joy such occasions give rise to, no wonder homecomings have proven such a rich seam for authors to explore. In Marilynne Robinson’s exquisitely written, moving Home, a prodigal son returns to the Iowa house of his father, retired minister Robert Boughton, 20 years after disappearing.
Of his seven siblings, only sister Glory is there, nursing her dying father and her disappointments.
Jack’s dissolute youth and disappearance allied his family. ‘They were so afraid they would lose him, and then they had lost him, and that was the story of their family.’ Now he has returned. Why? Will he stay?
Tessa Hadley’s The Past invokes a family holiday at a crumbling country rectory inherited by four middle-aged siblings.
On the surface, they get on, but the past always trips them up: ‘They were all continually surprised by the forgotten difficult twists and turns of one another’s personality, so familiar as soon as they appeared.’
Murray Blaire, the ageing patriarch in Elisabeth Hyde’s Go Ask Fannie, hopes his three grown-up children will not bicker during a weekend at his New Hampshire home. But when youngest daughter Lizzie arrives with a ruined copy of their late mother’s staple cookbook, a shared heirloom, tensions erupt.
Remember, blessed be the peacemakers, this Easter.