Inside the House of Broken Things

- on love, violence, and the rooms where women are un/made.

Photo by Frank Eiffert on Unsplash

By Kim Moore.

In the novel Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, Piranesi is a man who lives in a House that is more like a world than a building, more like a labyrinth than a house. Inside the House, there are oceans, and tides, and birds that come and go, and fish that he catches and eats, and stone statues that he names and that become a family to him. Piranesi is always alone, apart from the visits from the Other, a mysterious man who visits and then disappears.

The House could kill Piranesi at any point – if he doesn’t remember the rise and fall of the tides, if a storm comes and he doesn’t read the warning signs, if he doesn’t collect enough material to clothe himself, or build a shelter. But the House is also a place of safety, a place of bounty, the place that feeds and clothes him. The House is a place of great beauty and wildness, and part of its beauty is its mystery. Part of the beauty of the book are the questions it asks about knowledge, about what we know and what we think we know, about the things that really keep us prisoner.

This idea of a House being both a place of safety and a source of danger, a place of shelter and also a prison, a place you must know by heart and still never fully understand, a place that holds beauty and terror, death and life, love and violence at the same time, a house as a space where extreme binaries exist has always fascinated me.

I used a quote from Piranesi as an epigraph to my book:

"...that I was in a House with many rooms; that the sea sweeps through the house; and that sometimes it swept over me, but always I was saved"
                                                                     SUSANNA CLARKE, Piranesi

Of course I do not live in a House where a sea sweeps through the rooms, not a literal sea, but I have lived in houses where violence has swept through the rooms or where it seeps in like a slow-rising tide, and I recognise the character of the House, which could also be called childhood, which could also be called marriage.

In my second book All the Men I Never Married, I wrote about sexism and gender-based violence. As this article on the United Nations website points out, home is the most dangerous place for a woman. Statistically, women are most likely to experience violence from men they know. Men they live with, perhaps men they grew up with. Men they married, men who fathered them, or are brothers or partners, who share a home, a house.

I experienced this first hand in my twenties - but though it didn’t feel like it at the time, the sea did sweep over me, and I was saved, or at least, I saved myself.

When I became a mother, I spent much more time in the house than I ever had before. On one of the endless nights of early motherhood when I was breastfeeding my daughter, I felt a wave of the most visceral panic wash over me as I realised I could not leave. I was tied there not just by the practicalities of breastfeeding, but the reality of love, which was as visceral as the panic I felt in that moment. I wrote about this in a poem in my recent collection The House of Broken Things called ‘Dear Wordsworth’: “I did not know / what horror love could be, how it keeps you / tied to one town, one house, one room, / one chair, one life”.

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Later in the book I wrote about women who were found murdered and remain unidentified in a poem called “The Black Notices”. These women were found in the places women are often found, in bodies of water, in wasteland, in car parks, in forests. But once upon a time they lived in a House, and for whatever reason, they were not safe, they were pushed out, or driven out of a house, or they were kidnapped or lured away, or tricked on the way home, and now they are nameless.

The figure of the House and our expectations of it keeping us safe continues to haunt me. Writing The House of Broken Things has not exorcised the contradiction of the House from my mind or my desire to make sense of what it means to live with another - the gestures of love and the tiny acts of violence we inflict on ourselves and each other, and then if we are lucky, repair.

I’ve been doing quite a few readings recently and most have been followed by a question and answer session of some kind, and most of the interviewers (all apart from the one who didn’t bother to read my book in advance!) asked what the House was, what it represented to me, why I wrote multiple poems under the same title.

It’s taking me time to work out an answer that is in any way articulate, and part of the answer at least is that I don’t know, or I don’t know yet, or I am only beginning to know now. I know that the House is both the house of my childhood and the house of my motherhood, it is the house where I was mothered, and it is the house of my giving up, and the house of my enduring, it is the house of violence that I lived in once, and it is the house of my marriage, it is the house of loneliness and it is the house I escaped to, and I didn’t know until I finished writing this collection that I’m carrying all of these inside myself, that time means nothing inside the House.

And of course, the House of Broken Things is my chance to indulge one of my greatest loves, which is fantasy fiction, magic realism, speculative fiction – whatever you want to call what Piranesi and books like it do.

Because I invented a House, I could invent a god, a slightly menacing figure that passes through the house whilst the inhabitants cower behind doors. The god I invented is a woman, and she was worshipped by all inhabitants of the house, and she was the god not of the house, but of broken things, and by broken things, I mean the ‘Broken mothers and damaged fathers’ who lived inside the House. I mean the ‘fractured children’ who lived inside the House. In her poem, she ‘gathers shadows to her’ but it’s not clear if this is an act of protection, or a silent threat.

Because I invented a House, I could write about the house of my childhood. In the first House poem:

Books lined every wall of the house 
and all the stories they contained 
were stories of brokenness. 
The rabbits who set off for the hill. 
The clown who dragged a child 
down the drain. The tunnel full of rats, 
and countless fairy tales.

I was not allowed to watch horror films as a child – I can still count the ones I’ve watched now on one hand, but my parents had no such rules about books. These were the books I grew up on – Watership Down, by Richard Adams, which I broke my heart over as a child, It by Stephen King and The Rats by James Herbert – both books gave me nightmares. These books also taught me that language was powerful, that it can terrify us and make us sad and change our lives – and even more excitingly – my parents didn’t know this! As if language and books and stories were this beautiful secret I could keep to myself, if I only also kept to myself that I was now terrified of drains and tunnels.

Since my book came out, I’ve started collecting poems about houses. In my next post, I’m going to gather together some of my favourites, but for now, I’ll leave you with news of a workshop that I’m running for The Poetry Business. All proceeds from this workshop are going to The Poetry Business to enable them to continue doing the wonderful work that they do – so please do come along, or if you can’t come along, please send it to someone who may be interested! And we will probably, almost certainly, maybe be writing about Houses…

The workshop takes place on the 25th June 11am - 12.30 - click here to book a ticket!

If you would like to buy a copy of The House of Broken Things or All the Men I Never Married, you can head over to my website here for a signed copy