Mother Noise: a Memoir

December 1, 2021

Artist, author, and regular opener for David Sedaris on his tours, House is now marking 20 years of recovery after heroin addiction. Here she uses essays and graphic narrative shorts to reflect on the wonders of life and friendship and the responsibilities of parenthood, opening with her trying to figure out how to explain her past to her nine-year-old son. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2022
An essayist recounts her struggles with addiction and her concerns about its ramifications for her young son. Addiction and the challenges of parenthood are the focus of House's debut. "I carry the possibility of disaster," writes the author, who is best known for her regular spot as an opener for David Sedaris on his nationwide tours. In 2017, that fatalistic attitude is what led House to tell Atlas, her then-9-year-old son, about her past as a heroin addict. Raised in Connecticut, she spent her early adulthood in Chicago, a period that began with her "self-medicating, mostly with alcohol, plus any drug I stumbled upon," before full-on heroin addiction took its toll. House describes those memories in uncomfortable detail, such as the time she "almost killed someone on Sacramento Boulevard in Chicago " when she looked away to withdraw heroin from a packet and ran a red light; and her months at the Yale Psychiatric Institute for clinical depression, where Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried showed her that "humans had survived far worse than depression and had even gone on to write about it." Some essays are written as graphic shorts, with House's illustrations, and the book doesn't quite add up to a satisfying whole, as some pieces are too underdeveloped to resonate. But the best essays are powerhouses. Among them are a long piece about the Chicago apartment house she moved into with other recovering addicts, "bloated from a cocktail of prescribed psychotropic drugs," and an essay that describes her 30-year friendship with Sedaris, which began in 1987 when the not-yet-famous author showed students in his writing class an example of a complicated plot by having them watch One Life To Live. Despite the often depressing material, there is hope and considerable beauty in these pages, most notably in a section in which Atlas, showing uncommon compassion for his age, visits his dying teacher and holds her hand. A grim yet hopeful portrait of one woman's emergence and triumph over drug dependency.

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Starred review from March 14, 2022
A brutal story of heroin addiction gives way to a heartening look at motherhood in this brilliant debut from essayist House. Reflecting on that experience 20 years later, she explains her resolve in 2017 to tell her nine-year-old that she spent her 20s doing heroin. “If I tell him soon, it could become... a secret that might leave him feeling like he doesn’t really know me,” she writes before parsing her past sins via a mix of unflinchingly frank vignettes and vivid sketches. After depicting the anxiety-ridden childhood that ignited her decades-long quest to “numb” herself, she whisks readers through her seven-year affair with heroin in the 1990s in Chicago; multiple attempts at rehab; her harrowing abusive first marriage; and, eventually, the triumph of her hard-earned sobriety. She also shares the resonant story of finding her voice, with guidance from “the not-yet-famous David Sedaris,” whom she met while attending the Art Institute of Chicago. Echoes of Sedaris seep through in House’s mordant wit (“I crawled down... the bar on my hands and knees, like Jackie Kennedy on the back of the limo”), but it’s her raw prose and poignant musings on parenting—“the first really hard thing I’d done as a sober person”—that make this sing. A full-throated anthem of hope, this lends light to a dark issue.

Starred review from April 15, 2022
Writer and artist House opens this memoir-in-essays with her watching her preteen son enjoy himself unselfconsciously at a school dance and realizing that she will tell him about the ferocious addiction she fought before he was born. Motherhood and mental illness form the double helix of House's debut book that combines titled, episodic pieces with some of House's drawings, which resemble faithfully reproduced family photographs. Moving out of chronology and offering no tidy answers, House recalls the psychiatric hospitals and halfway houses she lived in as depression and substance use gripped her in her twenties, and the contents of the storage unit she let lapse and lost forever. She scratches at why she learned to bottle her emotions, and tries to help her son release his. One piece moves in a spiral through decades of House's meetings with her friend David Sedaris, her former writing teacher for whom she now frequently opens on tour, with gratitude for how ""you can't completely give up on yourself when someone you admire refuses to give up on you first."" Exalting art, our families, and ourselves, House's writing is serious with room for lightness, polished without sacrificing sincerity. Memoir devotees will find it hard to put down.

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Starred review from April 1, 2022

Essayist House opens this moving debut with a moment (having to tell her nine-year-old son that she had been addicted to heroin) that demonstrates the powerful human need to tell stories--even and especially when those stories disrupt the narratives people create in order to keep others safe. From there, the memoir explores what it means to give voice and space to stories that shape (and often shame) us into being. Photographs and drawings interspersed throughout the book give readers glimpses into where and how House's story was received by and integrated into her son's own identity and understanding. House shines particularly when writing about her past and speculating on how her community would treat her, and her son, if they fully knew about her history of addiction. With care and sensitivity, she depicts herself at different points in her life: as a curious child, as a woman navigating rebab, and, ultimately, as a mother to a son looking for answers. VERDICT A powerful, brilliant exploration of motherhood and its inextricable links to the other selves comprising a mother; those pieces that society doesn't accept as part of the entrenched narrative about the meaning and purpose of motherhood.--Emily Bowles

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.