Stand in My Window: Meditations on Home and How We Make It

Yvette (Woman of Color) explores the meaning of home in this lyrical essay collection. With chapters devoted to cooking, cleaning, and growing plants, Yvette considers how homemaking tasks have played out across generations, both in history and in her own family. For example, she links the Atlanta washerwomen’s strike of 1881 to the care she brings to hand-drying clothes, feeling grateful for “the women who came decades before I did” and allowed her to do so in “the comfort of my own home, during hours of my own making.” By finding meaning in other mundane tasks (hanging curtains, organizing a junk drawer), Yvette locates the spiritual quality of homemaking: “This is life at home, we piece together broken bits and reshuffle the mess, even though nobody sees it but us.” Elsewhere, she details her recent purchase of a 200-year-old house in the Catskills, which she plans to refashion into a residency for BIPOC artists and their families. Unfortunately, Yvette’s unwaveringly sunny descriptions of domestic life lose some of their luster as the collection wears on, and she offers fewer of the glimpses into her personal life that distinguish the early entries. Still, more often than not, her insightful musings brim with quietly radical insight. Readers will be captivated. Photos. Agent: Andrianna deLone, CAA. (Nov.)