On Returning
A quiet accounting of the years spent away, and the longer years spent finding the way back.
Order hardcover — $26 Read a longer sample →“A memoir that refuses the usual shape of memoirs. Marsh writes in the long breath — patient, unsentimental, unafraid of quiet.” — [placeholder blurb · editorial pull]
“The rare book about leaving that is actually about staying.” — [placeholder blurb · review]
Chapter One — The kettle
Opening sample · ~1,200 words[SAMPLE COPY — full opening chapter mounts here in production. ~1,200 words.]
I left the house on the last warm morning of that year. The rooms behind me were still arranged the way I had arranged them, the books on their shelves in the order I had trusted, the kettle exactly half-full. I remember thinking that the kettle was a small betrayal to leave behind. A kettle is always waiting for something.
For a long time afterward, I pretended the leaving was the story. It wasn’t. The leaving was only the opening line. The real story began later, in a borrowed kitchen in a town I could not pronounce, when I set down my bag and understood, with a clarity that did not feel like mine, that I would one day walk back through my own front door and find the kettle still half-full and still waiting.
That day did come. This book is an account of the years between.
I should say at the outset what this book is not. It is not a travel memoir, though it will pass through places. It is not a recovery memoir, though there was something to recover from. It is not a spiritual memoir in the sense that I once believed spiritual memoirs had to be — a rising arc toward a bright conclusion. My arc, if it has one, is horizontal. I went, and I came back, and the going and the coming back were the same walk, done in opposite directions.
What I learned in the going is that a person is not a house. A person cannot be left and found the way a house can, with all the furniture where you set it. A person metabolizes the rooms they stand in. The town I could not pronounce left marks on me that the town of my childhood would not recognize, and the walking back — this is the part I could not have known — was not a walking back at all.
[ Chapter continues — ~900 more words in production ]