A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember

Pearlman, who has edited collections of essays on friendship, mothers and daughters, American and Canadian writers and ""characters named Anna,"" invited a group of women to recall their personal experiences of ""home."" All professional writers--among them Maxine Hong Kingston, Francine Prose, Erica Jong, Rosellen Brown--many of them are restless wanderers and outsiders, escaping from painful childhood memories, who move around the country or from house to house, looking for a place where they feel they belong. Others fondly recall early ties, or expound on the pleasures of homes they have found for themselves, as does Jong in a paean to her house in Connecticut. Mary Morris, in one of the more notable essays, ponders the effect of place on a writer's work, observing that Southern writers have tended to stay put, such as Welty, Faulkner and O'Connor, who wrote ""essentially from their front porches,"" whereas Midwesterners such as Twain, Dreiser and Hemingway had to leave home to write. It's a theme that, like many of the fragments of autobiographies collected here, deserves much deeper exploration. Author tour. (Sept.)