Mary Gordon is the author of seven novels including The Company of Women and Final Payments. She is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 1997 O. Henry Award for best story. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City. In this creative and sturdy little volume about meanings of home, she writes:

"Our homes are also about display: how much we are worth, what our taste is. They are the source of our wealth and they drain it. They allow us repose and they demand what sometimes seems to be endless attention. For many women, the house is a metaphor for the body: and all important life is lived within its walls. And what is it to be without one? To be homeless is to be outside the web of the civilized."

The author, who moves around quite a bit due to her vocation as a writer, teacher, and speaker, has an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It is a large apartment on the first floor. Gordon is grateful that her living space is a benefit of her academic job and that she lives steps away from her workplace. She recalls the house of sadness and conflict she lived in as a youngster and a domicile she spent ten years in along the Hudson River where she didn't belong. Gordon loves her country house which she believes "wants to cause me the minimum of trouble."

Contemporary Americans are more protected from danger than any other people in history, yet there is a pervasive fear of vulnerability despite the preponderance of alarms and the efforts of the wealthy to wall themselves off from others in gated communities. Nodding to the wisdom of Gaston Bachelard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Witold Rybczynski, Colette, Edith Wharton, Mary Douglas, and others; Gordon probes why houses matter to us and the relationship they have to security, privacy, the changing definitions of family, morals, dirt, and disorder.

Here is a sampler of thought-provoking quotations which nicely spice up the text and universalize the multiple meanings of home:

• "I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself."
— Maya Angelou

• "Peace — that was the other name for home."
— Kathleen Norris

• "A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body."
— Benjamin Franklin

• "There is a magic in that little world, home; it is a mystic circle that surround comforts and virtues never known beyond its hallowed limits."
— Robert Southey