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Object Lessons
Hotel
During the breakdown of an unhappy marriage, writer Joanna Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer, and began to gravitate towards places designed as alternatives to home. Luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy…hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace. Part memoir and part meditation, this book visits a series of rooms, suites, hallways, and lobbies-the spaces and things that make up these modern sites of gathering and alienation, hotels.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
176 pages, Paperback
First published May 7, 2015
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564 people want to read
About the author
Joanna Walsh
19 books171 followersJOANNA WALSH is a British writer. Her work has appeared in Granta Magazine, gorse journal, The Stinging Fly, and many others and has been anthologized in Dalkey's Best European Fiction 2015, Best British Short Stories 2014 and 2015, and elsewhere. Vertigo and Hotel were published internationally in 2015. Fractals, was published in the UK in 2013, and Hotel was published internationally in 2015. She writes literary and cultural criticism for The Guardian, The New Statesman, and others, is edits at 3:am Magazine, and Catapult, and created and runs the Twitter hashtag #readwomen, heralded by the New York Times as “a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers.”
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews
April 8, 2018
This book was the most incoherent drivel I've read in a long time. If you were expecting a sociological or cultural study of hotels, then you will be extremely disappointed. If you are, however, interested in reading 150 pages of hard-to-follow, absurdist ramblings about the author's ex-husband interspersed with Freud, then you will love this book.
June 5, 2017
I love the book's premise - an author's reflections on the desirability and loneliness of hotels after the breakup of her marriage. But the way in which Walsh goes about writing about hotels left me wanting more. It is reflective and smart and curious, qualities I love in a book. But there was at the same time too much writing and inspiration taken from the work of celebrated white men, mostly from Freud. I wanted this book to be sourced more from off the beaten track. To be taken in stranger, deeper realms.
I admit that this was not the book I wanted, but that is not the book's fault.
I admit that this was not the book I wanted, but that is not the book's fault.
March 11, 2016
Loved the voice of the narrator and Walsh's ability to explore ideas in many forms. Some really clever exploration of sense of place and self within the statelessness of hotels and a failing marriage.
March 23, 2018
Hotel contemplates what it means to live and what constitutes home: "To 'stay' in a hotel is never like 'living' at home." We live in homes, so if one is not living in something that can be considered home--whether that be an apartment, dorm or trailer--is one living at all?
Walsh is a hotel reviewer looking for a place to spend her time other than home. "Hotel" recounts some of her experiences in hotels and what she learned about living during her time in the rooms that have revolving inhabitants. Interrupted by interludes of her failing marriage and the complicated feeling that come with the beginning of the end, Walsh's addition to Object Lessons is part memoir, part creative nonfiction. Her control over language, creating dual meaning from her hotel experiences and the state of her marriage, leaves the reader reading and rereading lines such as:
"On the screen, I keep checking the time: where I am, where you are, the thickness of house between I cannot wait any longer. The thick white hotel towels are restless. They want me to get into the water. They are the white pills. Usually you snap them in half, which makes a satisfactory sound--no, the echo of a sound, no noise."
and create meaning even when her audience changes from the reader, to her husband to herself:
"The square white bath has a crack across its corner...A pool pools underneath. I call room service. It is not my fault, but I must leave the room and walk through the white streets under the white sun until it is fixed. It is "not" my fault. The thing is: What am I allowed? If I don't "need" anything in particular, what am I allowed to want?...When you're not here, sometimes the problem doesn't seem to be you. It doesn't seem to be you at all."
I rate this book 4 because of Walsh's peculiar perspective, way of integrating hotels and separation and impeccable writing. However, Walsh spends much of her book discussing Freud, and a reader should be aware of before reading "Hotel." Without knowledge of his work, one has trouble making sense of many of the connections in "Hotel." As one who knows little to nothing about Freud other than his slip, I was left stranded during this sometimes page long musings. Likewise, Walsh cities the "Grand Hotel" film to describe her experiences and it is difficult to get through that part as well without prior knowledge. I cannot speak to these parts nor their relevance in the text; yet it should be noted that, even without completely understanding nearly half of it, the book is one that can still be considered very good.
Walsh is a hotel reviewer looking for a place to spend her time other than home. "Hotel" recounts some of her experiences in hotels and what she learned about living during her time in the rooms that have revolving inhabitants. Interrupted by interludes of her failing marriage and the complicated feeling that come with the beginning of the end, Walsh's addition to Object Lessons is part memoir, part creative nonfiction. Her control over language, creating dual meaning from her hotel experiences and the state of her marriage, leaves the reader reading and rereading lines such as:
"On the screen, I keep checking the time: where I am, where you are, the thickness of house between I cannot wait any longer. The thick white hotel towels are restless. They want me to get into the water. They are the white pills. Usually you snap them in half, which makes a satisfactory sound--no, the echo of a sound, no noise."
and create meaning even when her audience changes from the reader, to her husband to herself:
"The square white bath has a crack across its corner...A pool pools underneath. I call room service. It is not my fault, but I must leave the room and walk through the white streets under the white sun until it is fixed. It is "not" my fault. The thing is: What am I allowed? If I don't "need" anything in particular, what am I allowed to want?...When you're not here, sometimes the problem doesn't seem to be you. It doesn't seem to be you at all."
I rate this book 4 because of Walsh's peculiar perspective, way of integrating hotels and separation and impeccable writing. However, Walsh spends much of her book discussing Freud, and a reader should be aware of before reading "Hotel." Without knowledge of his work, one has trouble making sense of many of the connections in "Hotel." As one who knows little to nothing about Freud other than his slip, I was left stranded during this sometimes page long musings. Likewise, Walsh cities the "Grand Hotel" film to describe her experiences and it is difficult to get through that part as well without prior knowledge. I cannot speak to these parts nor their relevance in the text; yet it should be noted that, even without completely understanding nearly half of it, the book is one that can still be considered very good.
April 2, 2018
The narrative voice is too monotonously depressed for me to care about. Why did she marry the man? Why was everything broken and wrong from the onset? She buys a white rug and he buys a red sofa for their first home and those, according to the narrator, are indicators of how mismatched and ill-fated they are. Who forced those two to get married? Why should we care about how miserable they made each other when there’s nothing to balance the misery, no dimension to the characters as individuals or a couple. The narrator’s attempt to alleviate her misery by getting a break and distance through hotel hopping is a great premise, but she has the same lack of affect no matter where she is and what she’s looking at. Found it boring, which shocked me. I had read an excerpt from this book and absolutely loved it, was mesmerized by her prose style, and bought it anticipating a great read. Because a passage had been good when presented alone, I’m not giving it one star.
I got a few more of her books to read. Haven’t given up on the author yet.
I got a few more of her books to read. Haven’t given up on the author yet.
June 26, 2024
To change ourselves, to be transformed by the spaces we enter, by the people and experience we desire. Book was alright.
Favorite Quotes:
"How are you? I said. You said: "Sad, as I am always in transition."
"I am always escaping. I am no more than a suitcase."
"I want to be gently smothered by authority."
"I had a duty to the hotel, a duty to not be too human."
"I have second-guessed your desires, and those of others. I have made myself into a hotel."
"(I enclose myself in parentheses.)"
Favorite Quotes:
"How are you? I said. You said: "Sad, as I am always in transition."
"I am always escaping. I am no more than a suitcase."
"I want to be gently smothered by authority."
"I had a duty to the hotel, a duty to not be too human."
"I have second-guessed your desires, and those of others. I have made myself into a hotel."
"(I enclose myself in parentheses.)"
January 30, 2019
I came into this hoping for a discussion of hotels.
In some ways, that exists here. I don't really understand those connections, but they're there. For me, the hotel is certainly liminal, but I don't think I put expectations on it, besides a shelter and a bed. Even so, some have disappointed, but it's the conduit for travel, and I don't hate them, even in their dystopic sameness and blandness, their luxury extant in genericism. As such, the early and late chapters feel most like what I signed up for.
But Walsh has other ideas.
"I wasn't really in the market for something so philosophical," I tell my partner. "That's what I'm into," she reminded me.
Walsh's treatise on the hotel examines less the way we interact with the hotel space, and more about the person-as-hotel, as a spare, empty room for others to inhabit. It is more about the nonspace of hotel compared to the nonspace of the breakdown of marriage. It is more a pastiche of Freud and the Marx Bros, of women without voices and agency. It feels like a freeform mental purge, a catharsis, a stream of desperate consciousness. But in it, the threads get lost without having been in that same purge. As the topics flicker, the original thought often feels obscured. It becomes a much more cerebral text than expected.
And that's fine. But it was also difficult.
In some ways, that exists here. I don't really understand those connections, but they're there. For me, the hotel is certainly liminal, but I don't think I put expectations on it, besides a shelter and a bed. Even so, some have disappointed, but it's the conduit for travel, and I don't hate them, even in their dystopic sameness and blandness, their luxury extant in genericism. As such, the early and late chapters feel most like what I signed up for.
But Walsh has other ideas.
"I wasn't really in the market for something so philosophical," I tell my partner. "That's what I'm into," she reminded me.
Walsh's treatise on the hotel examines less the way we interact with the hotel space, and more about the person-as-hotel, as a spare, empty room for others to inhabit. It is more about the nonspace of hotel compared to the nonspace of the breakdown of marriage. It is more a pastiche of Freud and the Marx Bros, of women without voices and agency. It feels like a freeform mental purge, a catharsis, a stream of desperate consciousness. But in it, the threads get lost without having been in that same purge. As the topics flicker, the original thought often feels obscured. It becomes a much more cerebral text than expected.
And that's fine. But it was also difficult.
December 17, 2016
I'd read DRONES, another book in the object lessons series earlier this year, and mentioned I was a little confused about how to "read" it, since it felt almost like a catalog of technical specs about drones. This one, about hotels, definitely fits into a more conventional style for me, offering as it does a spine of a narrative about the writer and her time on the outs with her husband and living in hotels as a reviewer to avoid her marriage. But it's still a pretty weird read--
The book introduces into its investigation of hotels a lot of odd voices-- so we get a good portion of Freud's case with Dora, for example, as well as some Marx and some Marx Brothers. There's some old Hollywood in the form of the movie Grand Hotel. There's Kierkegard, and other outside voices that are adjacent to this conversation about hotels, but not always directly involved. And parts of the book follow the format of a play script, or perhaps a transcript, so voices are recorded and juxtaposed, rather than glossed and applied to the subject at hand. In other words, the reader does a decent amount of work putting the book together in his or her mind, to understand this thing, hotel.
I might not have made that synthesis entirely effectively, because as much as I liked the book, for its treatment of desire and its story of speaker Walsh's sense of dislocation, the hotel parts of this book were the least interesting parts of the book.... I learned some interesting stuff about hotels, but it felt like trivia compared to what I thought was happening elsewhere.
The book introduces into its investigation of hotels a lot of odd voices-- so we get a good portion of Freud's case with Dora, for example, as well as some Marx and some Marx Brothers. There's some old Hollywood in the form of the movie Grand Hotel. There's Kierkegard, and other outside voices that are adjacent to this conversation about hotels, but not always directly involved. And parts of the book follow the format of a play script, or perhaps a transcript, so voices are recorded and juxtaposed, rather than glossed and applied to the subject at hand. In other words, the reader does a decent amount of work putting the book together in his or her mind, to understand this thing, hotel.
I might not have made that synthesis entirely effectively, because as much as I liked the book, for its treatment of desire and its story of speaker Walsh's sense of dislocation, the hotel parts of this book were the least interesting parts of the book.... I learned some interesting stuff about hotels, but it felt like trivia compared to what I thought was happening elsewhere.
August 10, 2015
Thanks to Bloomsbury Academic for providing an ARC.
Well, I honestly expected something different from this book. I like all the movie references and quotes, but I can't relate to the author's experience.
In several moments, we can see how tired she is. She can't find anything fun about hotels anymore. Maybe I'm too young to understand, but as a Hospitality Professional, it breaks my heart to read things like: "My hotels do not resemble the home I long for, as I do not long for home. They do not resemble anything that can be longed for. They may resemble a longing for home, but they do not satisfy it."
Anything? Really?
That sentence destroys the whole point of my work.
We miss our things. We miss our families. That can never be replaced. Places need love to "become a home". It's normal and totally human to miss the dear ones we left behind. Okay. But you can't blame places for not filling voids caused by people.
To those who feel that way, maybe traveling isn't the key to your happiness. You need to work on your feelings first. You won't feel well anywhere in this world until you feel good with yourself. When that moment finally comes, be thankful that hotels exist to provide you good places to stay, and staff members work like crazy, doing major efforts to give you a pleasant experience.
Maybe you feel like the ghosts, but that's not how we see you.
Well, I honestly expected something different from this book. I like all the movie references and quotes, but I can't relate to the author's experience.
In several moments, we can see how tired she is. She can't find anything fun about hotels anymore. Maybe I'm too young to understand, but as a Hospitality Professional, it breaks my heart to read things like: "My hotels do not resemble the home I long for, as I do not long for home. They do not resemble anything that can be longed for. They may resemble a longing for home, but they do not satisfy it."
Anything? Really?
That sentence destroys the whole point of my work.
We miss our things. We miss our families. That can never be replaced. Places need love to "become a home". It's normal and totally human to miss the dear ones we left behind. Okay. But you can't blame places for not filling voids caused by people.
To those who feel that way, maybe traveling isn't the key to your happiness. You need to work on your feelings first. You won't feel well anywhere in this world until you feel good with yourself. When that moment finally comes, be thankful that hotels exist to provide you good places to stay, and staff members work like crazy, doing major efforts to give you a pleasant experience.
Maybe you feel like the ghosts, but that's not how we see you.
February 25, 2019
I can't quite explain why I found this book so irritating to read; the tone of voice, the bracketed witty remarks, the bored attempts at linking the notion of the hotel to the philosophical precedents - likely this was due to it not quite doing what I had hoped on the outset of reading.
It was largely due to the style of narration and this made me stop reading half-way through. The short strings of drama gave it a tone which read like a diary. This was especially annoying as just when the author was discussing an aspect of the hotel that I found thought-provoking, she would abruptly switch back to the personal ramblings.
It was largely due to the style of narration and this made me stop reading half-way through. The short strings of drama gave it a tone which read like a diary. This was especially annoying as just when the author was discussing an aspect of the hotel that I found thought-provoking, she would abruptly switch back to the personal ramblings.
February 3, 2016
My first dip into the fascinating looking series Object Lessons and I suspect I've picked a special one. It's a meditation on hotels tied up with the failing of the author's marriage and paralleled with a case study by Freud, with chapters written in a variety of formats.
Many quotes of knowingly dubious authenticity are included with Freud, Wilde, The Marx Brothers and Mae West among many other "characters" showing up. That makes it sound more frivolous than it is - and it is sometimes funny, but largely melancholy and quite poignant and insightful.
A short book that I'm glad I read.
Many quotes of knowingly dubious authenticity are included with Freud, Wilde, The Marx Brothers and Mae West among many other "characters" showing up. That makes it sound more frivolous than it is - and it is sometimes funny, but largely melancholy and quite poignant and insightful.
A short book that I'm glad I read.
March 9, 2019
Very bad writing, that gets you to nowhere! I was going to write a long critical review, but I found a review form the reader Stefani who expressed very well what i felt by saying:
"This book was the most incoherent drivel I've read in a long time. If you were expecting a sociological or cultural study of hotels, then you will be extremely disappointed. If you are, however, interested in reading 150 pages of hard-to-follow, absurdist ramblings about the author's ex-husband interspersed with Freud, then you will love this book".
"This book was the most incoherent drivel I've read in a long time. If you were expecting a sociological or cultural study of hotels, then you will be extremely disappointed. If you are, however, interested in reading 150 pages of hard-to-follow, absurdist ramblings about the author's ex-husband interspersed with Freud, then you will love this book".
July 27, 2016
I'm not really sure what I just read here. I wanted it to be interesting with pretty words, but it leaned towards the depressing lifestyle of the author more than anything. If that was the point, then I made a mistake of selecting this particular read of the series.
March 30, 2017
This was not great. I guess if you have a job like reviewing hotels it must lend to this kind of thought. But honestly I could never hear anyone talk about Freud ever again and be a-ok.
August 14, 2017
Interesting format, fragmentary thoughts on use of space and emotional impact of hotel life & disrupted home life
December 22, 2017
I was expecting something more conventional; I liked the more conventional parts but there was a lot of vague Freud stuff, and I don't like vague stuff or Freud stuff.
July 16, 2018
Literarily thoughtful books are hard to read...
November 26, 2018
A fascinating conceit with some interesting ideas that lacked cohesiveness for me.
July 27, 2025
I think an aspect of great writers that I really appreciate and hope I can improve upon in the future is the ability to express yourself in your writing. Maybe this is a bit of a reductive way to look at it, but if you call yourself a writer but can’t express yourself well, then what’s the point? Especially today in our dystopian AI world, I really value reading something I know for a fact is written by a person. Even if it isn’t the most groundbreaking or ‘technical’ writing piece ever, the fact that someone used their imagination and know how to put their thoughts into words is something I view as really impactful.
With all that rambling out of the way, this is really the pinnacle of someone expressing themselves in writing. I love staying in hotels and picked this up because of that and the fact that when flipping through this, I noticed part of it was written as a script. As an aspiring screenwriter, I thought that was really interesting. More than anything, this book feels like a true expression of a challenging time in the author’s life, told in prose and pieces of scripts (real or not). But at the same time, it’s a treatise on hotels, a movie review, an explanation of Freud, and a look into how relationships and marriage can crumble away into nothing. I adore this piece of writing. It was extremely impactful, and though I’m not going to say everyone I know will love this, I think it has a lot of interesting thoughts and questions that I think everyone should consider.
I’m grateful I gave this a read. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time to come.
With all that rambling out of the way, this is really the pinnacle of someone expressing themselves in writing. I love staying in hotels and picked this up because of that and the fact that when flipping through this, I noticed part of it was written as a script. As an aspiring screenwriter, I thought that was really interesting. More than anything, this book feels like a true expression of a challenging time in the author’s life, told in prose and pieces of scripts (real or not). But at the same time, it’s a treatise on hotels, a movie review, an explanation of Freud, and a look into how relationships and marriage can crumble away into nothing. I adore this piece of writing. It was extremely impactful, and though I’m not going to say everyone I know will love this, I think it has a lot of interesting thoughts and questions that I think everyone should consider.
I’m grateful I gave this a read. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time to come.
May 22, 2024
I'm a bit torn about this one. On the one hand, the book is quick, engaging, and well written. On the other, the ostensible subject matter, the hotel, is, in reality, at best a framing device--and one arguably subservient to Freud, oddly enough. I loved the opening sections, which contain the most sustained meditations on these non-places, but then it digresses.
For better or worse, I came here for "the hidden life of things." I'm not picky if an author explores these things via personal reflection, cultural history, theory, semiotics, etc., but, in a series such as this, I expect the titular object to take center stage. Walsh recruits some of the most obvious choices for exploring hotels (Freud on the uncanny, Marx on hotel labor, Heidegger on dwelling, Foucault on heterotopias), though, again, it feels like we don't get even the best version of what these thinkers bring to the topic.
Had I encountered this book without the Object Lessons connection at an earlier stage of my life, I would have liked it a lot. As it stands, I'm already familiar with some of the obvious moves, and impatient with narratives that decorously play with form to little cumulative effect, as if, by juggling interlocutors and ideas, the author had hoped to distract from the fact that it never all quite comes together after all.
For better or worse, I came here for "the hidden life of things." I'm not picky if an author explores these things via personal reflection, cultural history, theory, semiotics, etc., but, in a series such as this, I expect the titular object to take center stage. Walsh recruits some of the most obvious choices for exploring hotels (Freud on the uncanny, Marx on hotel labor, Heidegger on dwelling, Foucault on heterotopias), though, again, it feels like we don't get even the best version of what these thinkers bring to the topic.
Had I encountered this book without the Object Lessons connection at an earlier stage of my life, I would have liked it a lot. As it stands, I'm already familiar with some of the obvious moves, and impatient with narratives that decorously play with form to little cumulative effect, as if, by juggling interlocutors and ideas, the author had hoped to distract from the fact that it never all quite comes together after all.
December 22, 2017
A series of experiments gone very, very well. At times a play, at times memoir, at times a postcard.
I knew I would love this from the scene in which the author is in conversation with the French hotel owner and hears "guest" as "ghost", and continues to use them interchangeably.
This is a fresh prose that draws inspiration from many sources and still maintains its uniqueness in voice. Small language choices like "I thread my clothes on, obedient" went far.
The plays didn't do much for me, I'll admit, as it was incredibly interwoven with Freud's case study of Dora, which I have never acquainted myself with. Haven't had much interest in doing so, quite frankly. This does tell me that there's more that this book wanted to give me. Because I wasn't in a place to receive this, however, they were lost on me and at times easy to gloss over.
I'm impressed with this work. A breath-taking meditation on the concept of home and transition. A little, busy book that moves a lot.
I knew I would love this from the scene in which the author is in conversation with the French hotel owner and hears "guest" as "ghost", and continues to use them interchangeably.
This is a fresh prose that draws inspiration from many sources and still maintains its uniqueness in voice. Small language choices like "I thread my clothes on, obedient" went far.
The plays didn't do much for me, I'll admit, as it was incredibly interwoven with Freud's case study of Dora, which I have never acquainted myself with. Haven't had much interest in doing so, quite frankly. This does tell me that there's more that this book wanted to give me. Because I wasn't in a place to receive this, however, they were lost on me and at times easy to gloss over.
I'm impressed with this work. A breath-taking meditation on the concept of home and transition. A little, busy book that moves a lot.
June 9, 2022
60/100
What I thought would be a charming investigation of the sociological role and artistic design of hotels turned out to be an extremely abstract story of one woman's divorce symbolized through hotels, a Sigmund Freud case study, and various Marx Brother movies. The tone of this book is bleak, hopeless, almost apocalyptic as she roams from hotel to hotel with faux-joyful environments trying and failing to fill the hole left behind from the divorce of her husband. And as she painfully points out, the marriage should have ended, there was no happiness to be found in their ugly relationship. But that doesn't change how empty and directionless she feels.
It's an interesting and very neat idea that is often too abstract and/or confusing to maintain a tangent feeling, and the references seem esoteric to the point that I think she just wrote about the most recent book and movie she consumed before writing this. Overall, fascinating idea, mediocre execution
What I thought would be a charming investigation of the sociological role and artistic design of hotels turned out to be an extremely abstract story of one woman's divorce symbolized through hotels, a Sigmund Freud case study, and various Marx Brother movies. The tone of this book is bleak, hopeless, almost apocalyptic as she roams from hotel to hotel with faux-joyful environments trying and failing to fill the hole left behind from the divorce of her husband. And as she painfully points out, the marriage should have ended, there was no happiness to be found in their ugly relationship. But that doesn't change how empty and directionless she feels.
It's an interesting and very neat idea that is often too abstract and/or confusing to maintain a tangent feeling, and the references seem esoteric to the point that I think she just wrote about the most recent book and movie she consumed before writing this. Overall, fascinating idea, mediocre execution
December 1, 2020
I rarely don't finish books, especially relatively short ones - but I couldn't finish this one. I had read another book in the Object Lessons series and enjoyed it, so thought I'd try this out. It started well, with a series of interesting observations and musings on different elements of hotels, and I was really looking forward to the rest. However, it then began to focus on different tales centred around Freud - as if they were acts in a play. I am sure the failure might be mine, but I really didn't understand or enjoy it, and gave up when I realised that the vast majority of the rest of the book followed the same format.
January 16, 2023
This book will move you. It will move you to throw it far away from you with great force. Grammar is adequate. There were no misspellings that I caught. But this book would make Little Mary Sunshine take up dope. Apparently the author was going through the end of her marriage and decided the best way to represent hotels would be to enter into some sort of existential hell and take us along for the ride. She makes the Marx Brothers unfunny. Not recommended.
January 31, 2020
‘The mimetic tension between the home and the hotel is a constant thread in the book; it emerges and then disappears, only to re-emerge in a changed shape:
‘Hotel was once a word for house, but at some point the term took a turn.’’
Full review here: https://nicholasdeklerk.com/Joanna-Wa...
‘Hotel was once a word for house, but at some point the term took a turn.’’
Full review here: https://nicholasdeklerk.com/Joanna-Wa...
June 19, 2020
Anyone going into this book hoping for a discussion of hotels would be disappointed, but instead you get a rambling set of reflections on the authors sense of place and self as she navigates her job as a hotel reviewer in the year her marriage breaks down. For me, this is much better than a description of hotels, but your mileage may vary..
May 30, 2021
A disappointing installment in on my favorite collections...many authors take some creative license in their books, this one went a bit too far beyond the object and into the bizarre, rambling, psycho-theraputic, artsy, stream of consciousness. Setup as a great piece but I just got lost and missed the object on this one.
January 7, 2018
the hotel room as a space for the unhomely, feelings of abjection and of desire. the break-up of a marriage. words as junctions, as jokes, sly references, as having something within. mae west, freud, marx brothers appearances.
May 21, 2023
Idk I’m apparently one of a few who apparently really loved this one. The transience of hotels is near and dear to me and this writing mirrored my relation to it, even if we occupy that standpoint in different ways
March 28, 2018
Heady and layered. I'll come back to it.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews