A Good Morning America Book of the Month Selection • A Popsugar Must-Read Book of the Month • A Buzzfeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year
“Provocative…. [An] assured, beautifully written book.” —Sarah Lyall, New York Times
In this provocative meditation on new motherhood—Shirley Jackson meets The Awakening—a postpartum woman’s psychological … Year
“Provocative…. [An] assured, beautifully written book.” —Sarah Lyall, New York Times
In this provocative meditation on new motherhood—Shirley Jackson meets The Awakening—a postpartum woman’s psychological unraveling becomes intertwined with the ghostly appearance of children’s book writer Margaret Wise Brown.
There’s a madwoman upstairs, and only Megan Weiler can see her.
Ravaged and sore from giving birth to her first child, Megan is mostly raising her newborn alone while her husband travels for work. Physically exhausted and mentally drained, she’s also wracked with guilt over her unfinished dissertation—a thesis on mid-century children’s literature.
Enter a new upstairs neighbor: the ghost of quixotic children’s book writer Margaret Wise Brown—author of the beloved classic Goodnight Moon—whose existence no one else will acknowledge. It seems Margaret has unfinished business with her former lover, the once-famous socialite and actress Michael Strange, and is determined to draw Megan into the fray. As Michael joins the haunting, Megan finds herself caught in the wake of a supernatural power struggle—and until she can find a way to quiet these spirits, she and her newborn daughter are in terrible danger.
Using Megan’s postpartum haunting as a powerful metaphor for a woman’s fraught relationship with her body and mind, Julia Fine once again delivers an imaginative and “barely restrained, careful musing on female desire, loneliness, and hereditary inheritances” (Washington Post).
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Ugh
Just could NOT get into the story line of this book.
Definitely a page turner. Megan is a brand-new mom with a baby and ghost! That alone kept my interest from page 1 This story hits on every emotion. I was sad, happy, confused, angry, and annoyed at different times! It was a good story, truly inventive and one that really brought me back to my first days of motherhood. The ending left me sad and a little bit wondering!
The Upstairs House is a haunting that truly haunts. Julia Fine’s writing is sharp, dark, and delightfully twisty. A totally absorbing, fiercely feminist read that keenly dissects not just a psychological break, but the identities of and impossibilities for the women at its heart. This is a book that lingers.
A little bit Shirley Jackson, Samantha Hunt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but also completely itself, The Upstairs House manages to turn the banal terrors of early motherhood, of womanhood, and daughterhood, and the ghosts that inevitably accompany them all, into a riveting page turner about trying to love in spite of the traumas that loving has wrought in the past.
The Upstairs House is a terrifying jolt of a book. Here are all the openings-up of motherhood, and all the strains of its competing demands, taken brilliantly to their richest, most frightening extremes. I was riveted by every twist and turn of this story about the hauntedness of having a child.
The Upstairs House is an inventive, surreal, feminist examination of the postpartum experience. Is new mom Megan Weiler haunted by the ghosts of Margaret Wise Brown and her lover Michael Strange, or is she experiencing a deep postpartum depression? The Upstairs House reveals the isolating, world-changing, full-bodied experience that is new motherhood while unfurling a fascinating tale about one of our most beloved children’s book authors. I love Julia Fine’s brain and the radical stories she creates. Full of rage and resentment and deep love, The Upstairs House is a must-read.
By turns funny, eerie, suspenseful, and wild, Julia Fine’s The Upstairs House took me completely out of myself. Probing the sore spots of new motherhood and the power of language, Fine’s Russian-doll narrative lives in the narrow space between childhood dreams and grown-up nightmares. Like Rebecca Makkai and Lydia Millet, Julia Fine is, first and foremost, a unique and ultra-talented voice with something urgent to say. I’ll be reading everything she writes from now on.
Macabre and funny, spooky and soulful, Julia Fine’s The Upstairs House lets the reader inhabit a massively entertaining and slyly enlightening story nestled inside another story like a ghost within its host. Love and resentment, madness and clarity compete and comingle in this unforgettable tale of literature and legacy.
Thank you to Netgalley and Harper for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
“How would I hide from a part of myself?”
Some mothers take to their newborns as soon as their baby meets their chest. Some mothers find it difficult to connect for a time, needing to get used to caring for their child outside the womb before they begin to feel comfortable. And another set of mothers lose themselves amidst all the crying, sleeplessness, and constant feeding, wondering if they love their baby or just feel compelled to keep them alive.
Megan is one of the latter, struggling constantly to do best by her daughter, Clara. Her thesis has been pushed aside for months, as has work of any kind. All she’s expected to do is feed Clara, change Clara, and soothe Clara when she cries — something that Megan cannot seem to enjoy.
What to do, then, when Megan meets a new, unexpected (and probably ghostly) neighbor? And what to do after that neighbor lets in a poltergeist with far more demands and anger than Megan can keep up with?
This is the crux of Julia Fine’s magnificent story, but Fine reaches further to investigate feelings of failure surrounding motherhood, hysteria from a woman’s perspective, toxic relationships that persist beyond the grave, what constitutes art, choosing between a career and a family, and the all-too-haunting realities of post-partum depression and (perhaps) psychosis. The all-too-real vies for space with the speculative, building complexity matched by the main character herself as she grows into her own version of motherhood that, despite the interruptions from the dead, remains fully grounded in reality.
Pick up this book. Begin to read. And prepare to keep turning pages, madly hoping to understand the haunt and its mysteries.