Strangers in the House: Life Stories

by Dorothy Gallagher

Dorothy Gallagher’s critically acclaimed memoir, How I Came Into My Inheritance , told of her childhood in 1940s New York as the daughter of left-wing Russian Jewish immigrants. Time magazine called it “a piercingly funny book . . . unsentimental, breezy, blunt.” In Strangers in the House, this brilliant stylist takes us into her adult life and tells us honest, funny, and highly distinctive stories about love, friendship, and responsibilities–stories about ordinary life told in an extraordinarily compelling voice. As she puts it, with typical wryness, “Oh my goodness, the themes you stumble over as you make your way from day to day. Trust, Betrayal, Class, Hypocrisy, Love, Hate, Greed, Sickness, Health. It only needs War and Peace.”

Here, among other people and problems, we encounter a man who carries around brass knuckles, hoping to catch the lover Gallagher prefers to him–and whose behavior unexpectedly mirrors Gallagher’s own; the bizarre events that surround the disappearance of a woman with ties to both the Communist Party and Gallagher’s family; and the treachery of a trusted employee who is “bad with money” in more ways than one. The fragility of friendships, the fickleness of love, the marital crisis brought on by chronic illness–Gallagher dramatizes these universal themes with unique feeling, insight, and humor. This is a writer who will turn readers who come to her book as strangers into friends.

Genres: Memoir, Essays

160 pages, Hardcover

First published July 11, 2006

Reviews

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book because I enjoyed the author's previous book, "How I Came Into My Inheritance."

While the writing here is as witty and sparkling as that book, I must say that I felt that it would been more appropriately titled: "How all these People Used Me, Treated Me Poorly, and Ripped Me Off Because of the Really Bad Choices I Made in my Friends and Sex Partners."

Maybe I just found the history of her parents and their relationships with her more intriguing.

The most interesting part are the chapters devoted to when she did finally settle down and marry Ben Sonnenberg. They got married with their eyes wide open, because he already had M.S. and reading about the road they took as his condition disintegrated from using a cane, to a wheelchair, to being paralyzed from the neck down before finally succumbing is poignant and alone worth the price of the book.

Well, no. Also the chapters about her Russian relatives who somehow survived Stalin's genocide, including the ones that moved to the U.S. and then moved back to the newly minted Soviet Union to live in a "Socialist Utopia" is a painful and touching as it imparts a fascinating part of history: Anti-Semitism. Somehow her relatives thought Communism would eradicate that defect in Russia's make up. They were wrong.

Gallagher lived in an interesting world (still does for all I know, she's in her eighties). She's a writer, living in New York City. Her life is right in the middle of other writers, artists and all sorts of bohemian folk that are the ingredients to an interesting story, or so Kerouac believed when he wrote, "On the Road."

I don't find them all that interesting. After reading about so many immoral, selfish people with chaotic lives, they start to blur together.

Still, I would rank Strangers in the House above On the Road, maybe due to Gallagher's writing, which is very good, or because she was able to delineate the different people in her life, giving them a little more individualistic color.

Anyway, the book is still engaging and I read it in two sittings.

[Virginia Pommerening · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard book to rate as the different chapters vary widely in quality. I think that the book starts out fairly weakly with chapters where the author is writing to her husband about why the marriage didn't work, which could be an interesting way to start, except that I don't think it struck quite the correct tone. For a large portion of this book, I felt like the author didn't actually like to be in the presence of most of the people in her life, there was a bleakness there that I probably should have expected given the summary of this book.

That being said, portions of this were beautifully woven. I really enjoyed the way that Dorothy wrote about her family histories, because topics like that can be very difficult to write well. If I was basing my rating purely off the final chapter in this book, it would be a 5/5 because of the way she chronicled everything. It comes down to this book seeming fairly inconsistent in the point it was trying to get across.

[Judith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This autobiographical short story collection emulated literary fiction, but falls short. A few smatterings of "look I'm a published writer" navel gazing and an erudite lover do not a great collection make. Still I loved the picture of the dog and the title, although the title should have been Stranger in the House: Finding Myself Boring Among the Witty. Had Gallagher and her story collection been injected with self-confidence, literary references and an ebullient editor, then I'd think twice about rescuing this book from the weeding pile. Still I plan to read her multigenerational account, Hannah's Daughters (if I can find a copy stashed away in a library)and How I Came into My Inheritance because her Russian Jewish heritage should provide more fodder for thought. Let's hope.

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collection of short pieces about some of her life experiences, some of which were very interesting. My first experience with this author and I liked her writing a lot. These stories, except for a couple of puzzling exceptions, are painfully honest descriptions of events in her life, especially regarding relationships and some spectacular betrayals. I understand that a few of these were previously published, so that might explain why a couple of them seem totally unrelated to the others. The most involving piece depicted her life as a care-giver, and an employer of care-givers, for her gifted, writer husband who was stricken with the most disabling form of MS. The combination of all these stories gives one a somewhat bleak feeling about her life, but then she meets an elderly relative who survived the Holocaust and Stalin's purges, and she decides she doesn't have it so bad after all. A common reaction, but one that never lasts long, I believe, as one's own problems ultimately take prominence again.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

If Capote, or was it Mailer, invented the non-fiction novel, Gallagher has mastered if not invented the non-fiction short story. Pungent, frank, self-revealing memories these contained stories go down easy, like the first beer on a hot-afternoon, but they stay with you and demand re-reading. Gallagher presents stories of her adult life in New York (Brooklyn Heights, Manhattan) as a writer, lover, spouse, caretaker. Like an Arbus photo, each captures the grotesque and the beautiful, the real and surreal.

[Anna Skelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the memoir aspect of this book, but it was very all over the place and there were a few chapters that seemed to have no correlation with Gallagher's life. It was a very quick read, which is a plus!

[Kerri · Rating 5 out of 5]

i loved this book. i love all her stories she puts into the book. my favorite is the one about the same picture each day...love it.

[eLLen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book of memoirs was like listening to a friend talking to me.

[Stuart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like 'My Inheritance', another triumph! Such history! Such life! Such tragedy! Such wonder! Leaves me speechless!