Home Making

Three lives unfold side by side in this new novel by Lee Matalone, which follows identity, inheritance, and the work of turning a house into a home. Cybil was born after a brief affair between a young Japanese woman and a French soldier. As a small child she was taken to Tucson, Arizona, and raised by an American officer and his strict wife. She rebelled as a teenager, then built a career as an obstetrician and gynecologist.

Cybil's daughter, Chloe, lives alone in an empty house in the Virginia hills. Her marriage has collapsed, and her estranged husband is dying of cancer. Room by room she makes the house her own, while confronting the real and imagined limits placed on a single, childless woman in contemporary America.

Beau, Chloe's closest friend, has fallen in love with a man he has met only online, who lives across the country. While he supports Chloe through her grief, his thoughts keep returning to his loud, humid, chaotic childhood in Southwest Louisiana, where he first understood how queerness, loneliness, and place are bound together. The book is a sober but hopeful meditation on the stories we tell to build a family.