Interior Designs

by Sherril Jaffe

In a series of short interlinked prose vignettes, Sherril Jaffe explores the multiple meanings of “home”: an inner space, spiritual extension of ourselves; a place of shelter and protection from an impermanent world; a potential storehouse of profound affective memories.

From “Our Flat Was Built”:

“These dusty shelves reminded me of what I had seen once visiting in the house of a couple I never really got to know. Inside the bathroom of that house, beside the sink, were a set of glass shelves. The woman of the house was somewhat shorter than I, and, while the bottom two shelves were sparkling clean, the ones higher up were, like my kitchen shelves, covered in dust. She didn't see them, so she didn't dust them. From her point of view, the house was clean. However, she was limited by her point of view, and later I heard that her husband divorced her.”

Genres: Fiction

242 pages, Hardcover

Published February 1, 1997

Reviews

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Later, when we were sitting in the funeral home listening to the eulogies, it occurred to me that Ida was not exactly the person I had been thinking she was. I had thought of her as an old woman at the end of her life, but now that she was dead I could see that this was only one aspect of who she was. She had once been a baby, and a girl, and then a woman in middle years. Now that she was no longer present as an old woman, the other periods of her life had acquired equal weight.”