Home is where the art is: the rise of the epic domestic novel

“There’s no place like home,” Dorothy declares at the end of The Wizard of Oz, and that image captures a familiar artistic divide: adventure happens “out there” in Technicolor, while the home is often rendered in sober sepia. Writing my second novel, Natural Disaster, I worried about putting domestic life front and centre: the story unfolds over 24 hours as a woman’s final day of maternity leave with her two small boys unravels.

Yet home is where so much of our living happens, where formative relationships are forged and the earliest dynamics keep repeating. For writers, and women in particular, making the personal public can provoke fierce reactions. Rachel Cusk said she “regretted, constantly” writing A Life’s Work, feeling she had “committed a violent act” by telling the truth about motherhood, and later found the divide between life and book “completely breached” after Aftermath.

domestic novel, home, natural disaster, maternity leave, motherhood, rachel cusk, aftermath, dorothy, women writers, personal public