On Moving: A Writer's Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again

From Percy Blythe Shelley's ultimately fatal moving habits to Elizabeth Bishop's endless search for a true home, author and professor DeSalvo chronicles the writer's quest for the perfect home in this memoir-slash-literary history. A noted Virginia Woolf biographer, DeSalvo devotes a hefty portion of the book to Woolf's journey from home to home, and her insight into the poet's turmoil and hope is fascinating. The most compelling parts of the book, however, are DeSalvo's own, both in the particulars and the big picture: ""Most of my ancestors' moves, until my parents' and my generation... seem to have been caused by climate change... populations reaching critical levels, or by cataclysmic natural or historical events."" Still, DeSalvo's story doesn't feel quite complete; she never adequately resolve her seeming inability to move with the fact of doing so. Early on, she remarks that, like many, she was ""blindsided by moving's almost inevitable consequences,"" and by the book's end she seems not much closer to illumination. Still, her narrative is thought-provoking, and should interest lit fans struggling with a recent or impending move.