Woman House
Essays and Assemblages
Published on 3. March 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
224 pages
978-1-62534-923-1 (ISBN)
Description
A compelling and inventive memoir exploring how pain and pleasure are passed down through generations of women
For years, Lauren W. Westerfield looked back at her childhood as an imaginative playscape lovingly crafted by her artist mother. But in truth, theirs was always a fraught relationship, close yet turbulent. It wouldn't be until her mid-twenties that Westerfield would learn that her mother was assaulted while living as a single woman in 1970s Los Angeles, or until her mid-thirties when caretaking for her now chronically ill mother during pandemic lockdown would reveal how that earlier incident and its ripple effects had shaped both their lives.
The essays and assemblages in this book plumb the depths of two women's experiences, exploring the pain and pleasure they find in their bodies, in culture, and in their own art. Violence, beauty, and love reverberate and dissipate and shape the forms and psyches of these two profoundly connected family members. At once raw and refined, narrative and lyrical, nostalgic and blunt, the stories and images presented here explore Westerfield's life-from childhood to adulthood-passing through innocence, self-discovery and familial tethers. In unpacking her mother's history and the complexities of their relationship, Westerfield finds herself confronted with her own story: one grounded in a yearning for agency and individuation, of a body and mind groomed to be at odds with one another, of a feminist politics examining deeply rooted patriarchal understandings of beauty, control, and power.
Part memoir, part critical sense-making, part reckoning with family, identity, illness, addiction, art, and inheritance, Woman House draws on diverse inspirations in an attempt to recontextualize the female body-in danger, in pleasure, in portraiture, in proximity, in resistance-and challenge the structures that silence and restrict female expression.
For years, Lauren W. Westerfield looked back at her childhood as an imaginative playscape lovingly crafted by her artist mother. But in truth, theirs was always a fraught relationship, close yet turbulent. It wouldn't be until her mid-twenties that Westerfield would learn that her mother was assaulted while living as a single woman in 1970s Los Angeles, or until her mid-thirties when caretaking for her now chronically ill mother during pandemic lockdown would reveal how that earlier incident and its ripple effects had shaped both their lives.
The essays and assemblages in this book plumb the depths of two women's experiences, exploring the pain and pleasure they find in their bodies, in culture, and in their own art. Violence, beauty, and love reverberate and dissipate and shape the forms and psyches of these two profoundly connected family members. At once raw and refined, narrative and lyrical, nostalgic and blunt, the stories and images presented here explore Westerfield's life-from childhood to adulthood-passing through innocence, self-discovery and familial tethers. In unpacking her mother's history and the complexities of their relationship, Westerfield finds herself confronted with her own story: one grounded in a yearning for agency and individuation, of a body and mind groomed to be at odds with one another, of a feminist politics examining deeply rooted patriarchal understandings of beauty, control, and power.
Part memoir, part critical sense-making, part reckoning with family, identity, illness, addiction, art, and inheritance, Woman House draws on diverse inspirations in an attempt to recontextualize the female body-in danger, in pleasure, in portraiture, in proximity, in resistance-and challenge the structures that silence and restrict female expression.
Reviews / Votes
"In Woman House, Westerfield confronts the major questions of life-family, biology, and commitment; virginity, rape, and consent; embodiment, its joys and risks; the contemplation of art, literature, spirituality, philosophy-through a deeply personal, quotidian lens."-The Rumpus"Memory and feminism are potent themes in this intricate essay collection."-Shelf Awareness
"Woman House is a fractured text in which Westerfield explores her relationship with her mother, iterative memories, tellings and retellings, and the folded layers within a sense (or senses) of self. The result is a beautiful memoir built from intimate moments, fragmented memories, and collaborative questioning of the past."-Brandon Arvesen, True Magazine
"Fiercely written, full of urgency and daring, Woman House tears at the structures and constrictions passed down from one generation to the next. Each rupture of memory is a painful exposure, the telling and untelling and retelling a balm to the mother wound. Part treatise, part confession, part interrogation, all of it tinted with anger, love, curiosity, and compassion, Woman House is a meditation on the desire for desire - a love song to the unsated self."-Kim Barnes, author of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, Pulitzer Prize Finalist
"At once intimate, surgical, elliptical, and probing, these essays explore womanhood and daughterhood through the lens of art, pleasure, and trauma. Westerfield finds meaning in the smallest acts and rituals, trying to make sense of what it means to live authentically in and with the body. A feverish, glowing book."-Aysegul Savas, author of The Anthropologists
"Lauren Westerfield's Woman House is a beautiful study of environment and how it is a living, breathing entity just as much as the people who move within it. Through her hauntingly elegant writing, Woman House walks us through the environments of the heart, of the self and body, and of the family. This all converges into a moving story of the relationships with not only ourselves but also with those we hold most closely to our hearts. Westerfield's essays notice the shifts in life both subtle and obvious and invite us into the discoveries, too. She leaves each of us a little bit changed, a bit more reflective, and a lot more connected to the world."-Athena Dixon, author of The Loneliness Files
"This is a book about love and transformation. A memoir of loving and caring for a mother with whom she has an enduring but complex relationship, Woman House chronicles how a young woman learns to write her own story instead of accepting the cookie cutter narratives this society is so quick to force the minds and bodies of women into. A beautifully written account of coming to know and accept oneself, Woman House is a book that invites readers to greet the world and themselves with tenderness and care."-Kathryn Nuernberger, author of HELD: Essays in Belonging
"This is a book interested in what happens to our self-knowledge when we understand new things about our family history, in the traumas that are passed down to us, and what sense we make of them. Along the way, Westerfield explores Louise Bourgeois's art, old Hollywood films, the writing of Beat poet Joanne Kyger, and Jane Austen's novels, as well as medical research and the language of visual arts to explore spirals, repetition, personal habits, and family patterns. Westerfield deftly twists these many threads into her own kind of spirals, then untangles, until this sharp, complex, layered read becomes a reckoning, an unfurling."-Arianne Zwartjes, author of These Dark Skies
"Rendered in gorgeous language, Woman House traces the sometimes-fraught relationship between the narrator and her mother, amplified by the pandemic. Each of these essays reveal what it means to live inside a woman's body, through illness and aging and sexual violence. A collection that is both deeply thoughtful and deeply personal, Woman House imagines a way forward, even when our bodies and our memories fail."-Laura Furlan
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Massachusetts
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 13 mm
Weight
268 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-62534-923-1 (9781625349231)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Lauren W. Westerfield is author of Depth Control. Her essays and poetry have been published in FENCE, Seneca Review, Willow Springs, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Westerfield is a 2022 Idaho Commission on the Arts Literary Fellow. She teaches at Washington State University, where she serves as the editor-in-chief of Blood Orange Review.
Content
A Broom to Remove the DustOn Becoming
Twenty-Seven
Interlude: Background Music
Woman House
Double Exposure
Interlude: Milk Clock
Still Life
Sequence of Events
Breach
Interlude: Salt
Distance Instructions
A Kind of Chrysalis
Interlude: Brushwork
Pentimento
Notes
Acknowledgments
Twenty-Seven
Interlude: Background Music
Woman House
Double Exposure
Interlude: Milk Clock
Still Life
Sequence of Events
Breach
Interlude: Salt
Distance Instructions
A Kind of Chrysalis
Interlude: Brushwork
Pentimento
Notes
Acknowledgments