The House We Grew Up In

“Look at that sky, just look at it. The blueness of it. Makes me want to snatch out handfuls of it and put it in my pockets.”

This shows Lorelei’s love of nature but also her disconnection from reality. She lives in a fantasy world that’s about capturing the present moment and trying to hold on to it. Her husband looks at her with “love and worry,” suggesting there is an underlying problem he can’t mention.

“They lived in a honey-coloured house that sat hard up against the pavement of a picture-postcard Cotswolds village and stretched out beyond into three-quarters of an acre of rambling half-kempt gardens.”

The idyllic surroundings are an important feature of the book. This is a place that many people would want to live, but behind the façade, there are secrets and tragedies. The house is disfigured by Lorelei’s hoarding syndrome.

“‘And look,’ she gestured at the sky, ‘now it’s gone. Gone for good. For ever…’ A small tear rolled down the side of her nose and she wiped it away with a bunched-up fist, the way a small child might do. ‘Such a pity,’ she murmured, ‘to miss a rainbow…’”

Lorelei’s reaction to a rainbow disappearing demonstrates her childlike nature and love of color and beauty. She wants her children to appreciate it too, but they are starting to become independent, which frightens her.

“Her mother had been sitting in the middle of this room, hillocks of junk piled up around her, like a spider in the middle of its web, painting her toenails periwinkle and smiling at Meg as though all in the world was as it should be.”

Lorelei is happy having the house to herself because she has created another reality where everything is beautiful. Even though she gradually loses the power she had over her family, they are still drawn back into her web. While these surroundings would be intolerable for most people, they soothe Lorelei because they are her coping mechanism.

“She passed her phone to Molly and felt shocked by the transition from one world to another, from cleanliness and love and chaos, to dirt and loneliness and death.”

Megan is clearing her mother’s house with the help of her daughter. When her husband calls, she is aware of the difference between the life her mother lived and the one she has in London with her family. This demonstrates how Meg has cultivated a life opposite from her childhood, her own coping mechanism.

“His childhood was behind him. Kayleigh had walked into his childhood home an hour and a half ago and untied all the ribbons that had held him to this place for so long.”

When Rory takes Kayleigh to meet his mother, he realizes he has become strong enough to leave home and start a new life with the woman he loves. At this point, he is undergoing a transition between his past and his future.

“She waited for her to lose the plot, to scream and grieve and kick and scratch and cry and die a little. But she never did. She just kind of got on with it. Eerie. Unsettling. But also, maybe, depending on your outlook, utterly utterly marvellous.”

Vicky is captivated by Lorelei’s charismatic personality. Vicky is there when Rhys’s body is discovered, and she is in awe of Lorelei’s behavior—her lack of emotional reaction seems like a superpower. She is aware this is an unnatural reaction but doesn’t understand that this is not positive and indicates Lorelei’s inability to face reality.

“The older she gets, the more she feels that there’s nothing out there for her anymore. ‘It feels like it all belongs to other people, you know the grubby little face at the window of the smart restaurant. That’s how it appears to me. And here, in my home, with my things, I’m the Queen! In my palace! I belong.’”

Lorelei is becoming more isolated from others, and it is only in her home, with all the objects she has collected, that she feels content. Her world is starting to shrink, but she still has faith in her habits and rituals, emphasized by her insistence that she is a queen and her home is her palace.

“Just to think, you lived there, all of you, you were all just, like, normal kids, going to school and stuff, having friends and then, one by one you all left her and she died, you know, completely alone in, like the Worst House in Britain, or whatever.”

Molly finds it odd that was where her mother grew up, partly because her mother is so neat and partly because the house is unlivable. She can’t imagine what it would be like for her family to fall out and their house to be filled with tunnels out of newspapers. She wonders how things can go so “wrong,” comparing the extremity of the situation to a reality show.

“A woman appeared behind them in the queue, a serene creature in a white dress, tailed by two immaculate sylphlike daughters, all blonde, all legs. Meg glanced briefly at them, then her raggle-taggle mismatch of screaming infants […]” 

Meg struggles to deal with the chaos of motherhood. She has put on weight, and her children are acting like normal children. Still, she can’t help but compare herself to another mother, who is beautiful and calm and whose daughters are perfect. This thought characterizes Meg as insecure and demonstrates how she defines herself through discipline and perfection.

“I feel so trapped, Meggy. I feel like Gulliver, tied down all over with tiny little ropes, like they’re all so tiny, but there’s so many of them that I can’t move…And most of them are in my own head.”

In a heart-to-heart with her sister, Bethan references Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel. Swift’s protagonist travels to Lilliput, where he is captured by a race of tiny people and pinned to the ground. This allusion shows that Beth feels trapped by her life. She’s nearly 30 and still living at home with her mother, unable to move on from the past because of her brother’s death and her mother’s mental health issues.

“The phone call had been agonising. All she could hear were the sounds of the life she wanted. Children keening with joy. The splash of a pool. The sound of distant waves caressing distant sand. The sound of foreign.”

When Beth calls Bill on vacation, her sister picks up the phone. The sounds in the background make Beth long for the life Meg has, indicating that this affair is less about sexual attraction and more about escaping through Bill into a better life. She longs to escape but is still at home, having the same Easter Sunday as every other year.

“‘Jesus, Rory. The man’s a buffoon! I mean, look at him. ‘I don’t trust anyone—’ He rolled his shoulders, mimicking Owen’s Essex growl.”

Colin punctures Rory’s idolization of Owen, the man he works for in Thailand. Rory thinks of Owen as his friend, a surrogate brother, and is proud to introduce him to his father. Colin doesn’t trust him, seeing him as the self-seeking criminal he truly is. This foreshadows Owen’s later betrayal of Rory and exposes Rory’s lifestyle as shallow and meaningless.

“What happened to us. We used to be such a tight-knit little bunch. And now we’re like a bunch of raggle-taggle gypsies.”

Lorelei is upset that her children have all left home and are scattered around the world. She can’t understand how this has happened when they used to be so close-knit. They have all been affected in different ways by Rhys’s death and her hoarding, but she refuses to see this. “What happened to us” is phrased as a question, but the lack of a question mark represents how Lorelei is not yet ready to hear the answer.

“I’ve tried my hardest these last few years to accept the beating wings of my baby birds as they flew not just the nest, but in some cases the continent. I’ve let you all go. And now I need you all to come back.”

After Vicky’s death, Lorelei is completely alone. She can’t function properly without support, so she emails asking her children and ex-husband to come back for the funeral. Describing them as “baby birds” draws attention to the bird motif in the book.

“I know as well as you do that only the individual has the key to change themselves. It’s buried deep inside each and every one of us and although someone else can help us to find the key, we’re the only ones who can use it.”

The book provides several “clues” as to why Rhys killed himself and Lorelei became a hoarder. With Jim’s help, Lorelei is getting nearer to facing the truth. That she even acknowledges there is a secret to unlock shows progress. Later, Rory finds the password for her laptop, the “key” that lets the rest of the family find out what happened.

“It’s in our minds, in our hearts, that a person’s spirit lives on. And I felt SO SAD, Jim, that all these years I’ve denied his spirit because I couldn’t bear to think of him. Like I’d stifled his spirit. Let it fester.”

As Lorelei begins to uncover the reasons for her son’s death with Jim’s support, she goes into his room for the first time in years. She feels his spirit, which she sees as another word for memory, and she begins to feel the grief she’s denied herself. Rhys lives on in her and the rest of the family, to whom he’ll always be connected. She thought that preserving his room like this was honoring his memory, but in refusing to think of him, she let her loss ruin everything around her.

“Of course, that is why I reacted so strongly to Beth’s affair with Bill, to Colin getting together with Kayleigh. And yes, even the man who raped my mother touching me the way he did. It’s all vaguely incestuous, isn’t it? It’s all just a shade away from natural.”

Lorelei realizes how tightly interwoven the threads of her life have been. The events of her childhood are connected to what happened in her own family, especially Rhys’s incestuous feelings for her. This realization allows her to face reality instead of hiding away from it. The theme of incest runs through the book and plays a part in Lorelei’s disordered mental state.