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Halfway from Home
When she left a chaotic home at eighteen, Sarah Fawn Montgomery chased restlessness, claiming places on the West Coast, Midwest, and East Coast, while determined never to settle. But it is difficult to move forward when she longs for the past. Now her family is ravaged by addiction, illness, and poverty; the country is increasingly divided; and the natural worlds in which she seeks solace are under siege by wildfire, tornados, and unrelenting storms. Turning to nostalgia as a way to grieve a rapidly-changing world, Montgomery excavates the stories and scars we bury, unearthing literal and metaphorical childhood time capsules and treasures.
Blending lyric memoir with lamenting cultural critique, Montgomery examines contemporary longing and desire, sorrow and ache, searching for how to build a home when human connection is disappearing, and how to live meaningfully when our sense of self is uncertain in a fractured world. Taking readers from the tide pools and monarch groves of California, to the fossil beds and grass prairies of Nebraska, to the scrimshaw shops and tangled forests of Massachusetts, Montgomery holds a mirror up to America and asks us to reflect on our past before we run out of time to save our future. Halfway from Home grieves a vanishing world while offering—amidst emotional and environmental collapse—ways to discover hope, healing, and home.
Blending lyric memoir with lamenting cultural critique, Montgomery examines contemporary longing and desire, sorrow and ache, searching for how to build a home when human connection is disappearing, and how to live meaningfully when our sense of self is uncertain in a fractured world. Taking readers from the tide pools and monarch groves of California, to the fossil beds and grass prairies of Nebraska, to the scrimshaw shops and tangled forests of Massachusetts, Montgomery holds a mirror up to America and asks us to reflect on our past before we run out of time to save our future. Halfway from Home grieves a vanishing world while offering—amidst emotional and environmental collapse—ways to discover hope, healing, and home.
- GenresEssaysMemoirNonfiction
177 pages, Paperback
Published November 8, 2022
2 people are currently reading
89 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
November 13, 2022
A little heart crushing.
June 6, 2024
I struggled with this book at first, but about 3 or 4 essays in, it really started to hit its stride for me. The more I understand the writer, the more I felt the writing as something relatable to me.
I think I struggle a bit with the genre of an essay collection, particularly with a single author using her own life. It seems to create repeating narrative arcs that follow the same/similar emotional paths. Sometimes that is a bit hard for me to follow emotionally and becomes frustrating.
Nonetheless, I really felt the power of some of the metaphors and themes she used to describe herself, community, climate change, the transience of home, and the pandemic.
Favorites include:
- descendant
- carve
- moon call
- rising tide
- taking stock
Couple other notes:
- it’s super fun to read about Nebraska, particularly from a writer who isn’t from Nebraska but came to love it, at least for a time
- I will be thinking for a while about the statement, Nebraska “demands a love affair with the weather”
I think I struggle a bit with the genre of an essay collection, particularly with a single author using her own life. It seems to create repeating narrative arcs that follow the same/similar emotional paths. Sometimes that is a bit hard for me to follow emotionally and becomes frustrating.
Nonetheless, I really felt the power of some of the metaphors and themes she used to describe herself, community, climate change, the transience of home, and the pandemic.
Favorites include:
- descendant
- carve
- moon call
- rising tide
- taking stock
Couple other notes:
- it’s super fun to read about Nebraska, particularly from a writer who isn’t from Nebraska but came to love it, at least for a time
- I will be thinking for a while about the statement, Nebraska “demands a love affair with the weather”
November 18, 2022
Disclaimer: I run the Split/Lip Press Instagram.
This memoir studies place and family and how you make friends that become your family. Several sections made me think of my own father and tear up because Montgomery perfectly captures the intricacy of these relationships. It’s very touching and the structure of many essays are unique and engaging.
This memoir studies place and family and how you make friends that become your family. Several sections made me think of my own father and tear up because Montgomery perfectly captures the intricacy of these relationships. It’s very touching and the structure of many essays are unique and engaging.
March 19, 2023
"I fog the window with my wanting."
Sarah Fawn Montgomery's essay collection, Halfway From Home, traverses more than just the literal space between homes in California, Nebraska, and Massachusetts, or the search for home in these places. This book is chalk filled with the terrain of desire. Desire for family, for love, for protection, but also desire, the quicksand we call nostalgia, for a world which no longer seems to exist or at best is fading fast. How do we find ourselves at home in a world ruled by gluttony, by feeding and feeding and refusing to bend? Montgomery explores the intersections of place, climate disaster, our large and small human griefs, violence (that which we commit on the world, on each other, and on ourselves). I took my time reading this collection, but that is because you need to move through it slowly, the way you traverse through a lush wood. Watch for snails under your feet and keep a keen ear out for woodpeckers or frogs. Don't forget to look up.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery's essay collection, Halfway From Home, traverses more than just the literal space between homes in California, Nebraska, and Massachusetts, or the search for home in these places. This book is chalk filled with the terrain of desire. Desire for family, for love, for protection, but also desire, the quicksand we call nostalgia, for a world which no longer seems to exist or at best is fading fast. How do we find ourselves at home in a world ruled by gluttony, by feeding and feeding and refusing to bend? Montgomery explores the intersections of place, climate disaster, our large and small human griefs, violence (that which we commit on the world, on each other, and on ourselves). I took my time reading this collection, but that is because you need to move through it slowly, the way you traverse through a lush wood. Watch for snails under your feet and keep a keen ear out for woodpeckers or frogs. Don't forget to look up.
February 14, 2023
Disclosure: I do know Sarah Fawn Montgomery as she was a writing professor of mine at Bridgewater State University. However, I’ll attempt to provide as objective a review as I can here.
In truth, Halfway from Home is a captivating collection of essays spanning from the author’s childhood in California, to her higher education in Nebraska, and her adulthood in Massachusetts. I especially appreciate the nostalgic look at her childhood, digging in the back yard, struggling with social pressures in school, and the relationship she had with her family as she grew up. Family isn’t always warm and welcoming, and Sarah Fawn captures the difficult moments as well as those we long to recall. The isolation of the pandemic also rears its head in this volume, but in a way that is more about how the timing was unfortunate for the author rather than in a politically charged rant, which can often be the case. As for style, Montgomery’s prose is breathtaking at times, vivid without over reaching, emotional, but not unnecessarily affective.
In truth, Halfway from Home is a captivating collection of essays spanning from the author’s childhood in California, to her higher education in Nebraska, and her adulthood in Massachusetts. I especially appreciate the nostalgic look at her childhood, digging in the back yard, struggling with social pressures in school, and the relationship she had with her family as she grew up. Family isn’t always warm and welcoming, and Sarah Fawn captures the difficult moments as well as those we long to recall. The isolation of the pandemic also rears its head in this volume, but in a way that is more about how the timing was unfortunate for the author rather than in a politically charged rant, which can often be the case. As for style, Montgomery’s prose is breathtaking at times, vivid without over reaching, emotional, but not unnecessarily affective.
December 3, 2022
Read it, read it, read it. Montgomery's sentences are delicious even as the narratives and people she turns over in her writerly hands are sometimes painful, full of ambiguities and apparent contradictions that sit side by side in a space of but/and/also. A parent can be both harsh and loving, can make a person feel like not enough and like everything, can change over the course of years and hardships and needs and wants. A marriage can slide through dark and damp caverns of ache and come out the other side with an ember still hot enough to blow gently back into flame. The world is cruel and kind, the forces of nature both relentless and restorative. Montgomery sits firmly in that space of halfways and gently allows herself and her readers to acknowledge that the between is perhaps the most permanent place we'll end up.
November 5, 2022
Beautiful and descriptive language!
Sarah Fawn Montgomery's Halfway from Home is a gorgeous read! You'll find yourself wrapped up in its language and the beautiful words Montgomery uses to convey a sense of nostalgia for a world and home that isn't even yours. Her way with words is just amazing... you have to read it to believe it. I can't recommend it enough. If you want to walk a beautiful path from the sunny beaches of California, to the prairies of the Midwest, and finally the forests of New England through the eyes of this amazing narrator, give this one a shot. I promise you won't regret it!
Sarah Fawn Montgomery's Halfway from Home is a gorgeous read! You'll find yourself wrapped up in its language and the beautiful words Montgomery uses to convey a sense of nostalgia for a world and home that isn't even yours. Her way with words is just amazing... you have to read it to believe it. I can't recommend it enough. If you want to walk a beautiful path from the sunny beaches of California, to the prairies of the Midwest, and finally the forests of New England through the eyes of this amazing narrator, give this one a shot. I promise you won't regret it!
February 21, 2023
I enjoy the way she uses words, but was bored by her essays.
September 12, 2023
A beautifully written essay collection. Montgomery excavates family and identity positioned against geography with great intelligence and tenderness.
November 24, 2022
Halfway From Home is a lyrical and precise cartography of what it means to belong—to a place, to poverty, to a family where abundance never visits, to a life shaped by restlessness as an escape from pain. Montgomery sings language like the poet she is, and charts the connections between her life and life in general with the care of a scientist explicating data. The result is a riveting mapping of her search for home and self in a life propelled by the tightly braided love and trauma of her upbringing, the pain of losing siblings to addiction and violence, and the tearing grief of her beloved father’s death from cancer.
Excavating her past like an archeologist sifting through layers, Montgomery carefully examines what she finds like so many artifacts, from the treasure holes in a childhood backyard that her fence-building father salted for her with bits he found as he dug post-holes, to her fear of clocks ticking the passing of time, and spiraling outward, to gun violence, the pandemic, and the great anguish of loss from climate change.
Along the way she writes a brilliant lesson on maps and the way we draw lines to tell the story that reinforces our view of the world, examines the trauma of drug abuse in her siblings and her students, and reckons as best she can with her grief at moving to a place she cannot feel at home, a whole continent away from the California coast where she grew up and where her father is dying.
Montgomery’s reflections come in chunks like artifacts sifted out of soil, and she turns each over with such precise language that the reader catches her breath at the contrast between personal revelation and the dispassionate observations of contemporary culture and knowledge. Listen to this passage from the essay “Chronostasis”:
"The invention of the pendulum clock in 1656 erased time.
"Until then, clock accuracy averaged a deviation of fifteen minutes a day, as though it were possible to live across memory and history.
"Fifteen minutes a day is a significant portion of the mayfly’s 24-hour lifespan after they emerge from water nymphs to fly to the sky. Fifteen minutes a day of meditation can recruit new neural networks in the brain. Fifteen minutes of sunshine is enough to maintain the Vitamin D levels that keep you happy. In 1968, Andy Warhol predicted, ‘In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.’ In fifteen minutes, you can walk a mile or sleep with your lover….
"With the clock’s invention however—a swinging weight around its neck—the accuracy of clocks improved. The deviation shrunk to a mere fifteen seconds a day."
And then her musing turns personal: “As a child, I lie in bed, worrying about time. It is running out, meaning I am already dying, am a fearful ghost haunting my own room, my chance at sleep slipping through my fingers like sand, the next day destined to be a blur, dreamlike without the watercolor and whimsy. I do not like clocks that make sounds.”
Montgomery’s ability to explicate grief and pain is breathtaking, the very essence of memoir. The meaning she makes from her life is harsh and at the same time, poignantly beautiful, a kind of grace rising from the sifted ashes, like the Phoenix itself. Halfway From Home is a song of seeking, a restless journey that spans miles, years, and hearts, a careful mapping of the route one soul has traced in order to survive and even thrive through the darkest of times.
(Review originally posted in Story Circle Book Reviews.)
Excavating her past like an archeologist sifting through layers, Montgomery carefully examines what she finds like so many artifacts, from the treasure holes in a childhood backyard that her fence-building father salted for her with bits he found as he dug post-holes, to her fear of clocks ticking the passing of time, and spiraling outward, to gun violence, the pandemic, and the great anguish of loss from climate change.
Along the way she writes a brilliant lesson on maps and the way we draw lines to tell the story that reinforces our view of the world, examines the trauma of drug abuse in her siblings and her students, and reckons as best she can with her grief at moving to a place she cannot feel at home, a whole continent away from the California coast where she grew up and where her father is dying.
Montgomery’s reflections come in chunks like artifacts sifted out of soil, and she turns each over with such precise language that the reader catches her breath at the contrast between personal revelation and the dispassionate observations of contemporary culture and knowledge. Listen to this passage from the essay “Chronostasis”:
"The invention of the pendulum clock in 1656 erased time.
"Until then, clock accuracy averaged a deviation of fifteen minutes a day, as though it were possible to live across memory and history.
"Fifteen minutes a day is a significant portion of the mayfly’s 24-hour lifespan after they emerge from water nymphs to fly to the sky. Fifteen minutes a day of meditation can recruit new neural networks in the brain. Fifteen minutes of sunshine is enough to maintain the Vitamin D levels that keep you happy. In 1968, Andy Warhol predicted, ‘In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.’ In fifteen minutes, you can walk a mile or sleep with your lover….
"With the clock’s invention however—a swinging weight around its neck—the accuracy of clocks improved. The deviation shrunk to a mere fifteen seconds a day."
And then her musing turns personal: “As a child, I lie in bed, worrying about time. It is running out, meaning I am already dying, am a fearful ghost haunting my own room, my chance at sleep slipping through my fingers like sand, the next day destined to be a blur, dreamlike without the watercolor and whimsy. I do not like clocks that make sounds.”
Montgomery’s ability to explicate grief and pain is breathtaking, the very essence of memoir. The meaning she makes from her life is harsh and at the same time, poignantly beautiful, a kind of grace rising from the sifted ashes, like the Phoenix itself. Halfway From Home is a song of seeking, a restless journey that spans miles, years, and hearts, a careful mapping of the route one soul has traced in order to survive and even thrive through the darkest of times.
(Review originally posted in Story Circle Book Reviews.)
June 15, 2023
Reviewed by Frank Penick on www.rowanglassworks.org.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery's Halfway from Home is an intensely personal journey that flashes a reflective mirror upon American society exposing our collective imperfections and scars. Ever searching for clarity and reconciliation, Montgomery writes: “When I fly home to California from where I live in Massachusetts, crossing time zones and great distances like a space traveler, I spy Nebraska, another former home, another me in another time. No matter when I am or where I go, I am always halfway from home” (28). Halfway from Home takes the reader on a journey through memory and nostalgia. This nonlinear style starts in the opening sequences, beginning in San Miguel, California in 1991 where Montgomery, as her childhood self, digs with her favorite pail to find treasure in a magical backyard hole. Then four paragraphs later we are taken to Morro Bay, California, 1988 where she follows her father along the beach as he walks in the sand, struggling unsuccessfully to leave the same impression as his larger tracks. Almost immediately after, we are again transported to the year 1975, where her father shapes the land with his tools of labor. Just as fast, we are back to 1993, where Montgomery buried her dead frog, and her father could not understand why she was so emotional about it. The author provides the reader with several snapshots of memory from the years 1996, 2008, 2012, 2015, and so on.
In spite of the non-linear narrative, the first section of essays, Dig Site, is tied together by the author’s perspective of events and the earth itself. Through each segment of time, we learn more about the relationship between the author, her family, her environment and how her perceptions of the same events changed with maturity and exposure. For example, in 2015 we learn that her magical hole for finding treasure as a child were trinkets planted by her father when the author was not looking. This is an example of how the childhood innocence is lost, just as she realizes the hole in her backyard was not magic, her father becomes less of a heroic figure and more of a broken man struggling to make meaning in the world after he loses his job. This theme of moving across time, and space to make meaning repeats through the entirety of Halfway from Home.
Montgomery's writing is enhanced by her ability to seamlessly weave in metaphors and analogies that highlight her themes of growth and acceptance:
“The queen searches for wood fiber from trees, logs, fences, cardboard left by the side of the road. She builds a home by stripping out the insides of another. Her jaws are strong and she chews fibers to a soft pulp. To build the walls of her home she spits out what she has ground down to nothing. She empties herself to house others. The queen exists in an endless act of leaving, searching, only to be compelled back, called home” (42).
Montgomery then relates how a wasp, simply by making a home for themselves, impacted her own new home with an infestation—the same home she wanted to leave, just as wasps abandon their home each season.
“Soon it is impossible to escape the sound of the growing threat. Buzzing builds along with a bubble beneath the balcony where I sit to escape [...]
I want to escape my husband, who insists we stay here and call it home. We have become strangers here and the longer I stay, the more I feel a stranger to myself. I want to escape the house he insisted we buy as though this house would save our marriage” (41).
Montgomery’s ability to weave such lessons about the physical world and natural phenomena into the personal essays of discovery and loss, offers a glimpse into her sensitivity and intellectual prowess, all the while reflecting on the state of society.
Throughout Halfway from Home it becomes evident that Montgomery is a scholar with a skill for effectively offering numerous lessons that stimulate the mind yet pull on the heart strings. The book concludes with a gut-wrenching final chapter of watching her father slowly deteriorate due to illness. Although Halfway from Home explores many themes and relationships, it is ultimately a cathartic series of essays of how a little girl, who loves her father through all his imperfections, travels the country, grows into a woman, and returns home to be by his side in his final hours.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery's Halfway from Home is an intensely personal journey that flashes a reflective mirror upon American society exposing our collective imperfections and scars. Ever searching for clarity and reconciliation, Montgomery writes: “When I fly home to California from where I live in Massachusetts, crossing time zones and great distances like a space traveler, I spy Nebraska, another former home, another me in another time. No matter when I am or where I go, I am always halfway from home” (28). Halfway from Home takes the reader on a journey through memory and nostalgia. This nonlinear style starts in the opening sequences, beginning in San Miguel, California in 1991 where Montgomery, as her childhood self, digs with her favorite pail to find treasure in a magical backyard hole. Then four paragraphs later we are taken to Morro Bay, California, 1988 where she follows her father along the beach as he walks in the sand, struggling unsuccessfully to leave the same impression as his larger tracks. Almost immediately after, we are again transported to the year 1975, where her father shapes the land with his tools of labor. Just as fast, we are back to 1993, where Montgomery buried her dead frog, and her father could not understand why she was so emotional about it. The author provides the reader with several snapshots of memory from the years 1996, 2008, 2012, 2015, and so on.
In spite of the non-linear narrative, the first section of essays, Dig Site, is tied together by the author’s perspective of events and the earth itself. Through each segment of time, we learn more about the relationship between the author, her family, her environment and how her perceptions of the same events changed with maturity and exposure. For example, in 2015 we learn that her magical hole for finding treasure as a child were trinkets planted by her father when the author was not looking. This is an example of how the childhood innocence is lost, just as she realizes the hole in her backyard was not magic, her father becomes less of a heroic figure and more of a broken man struggling to make meaning in the world after he loses his job. This theme of moving across time, and space to make meaning repeats through the entirety of Halfway from Home.
Montgomery's writing is enhanced by her ability to seamlessly weave in metaphors and analogies that highlight her themes of growth and acceptance:
“The queen searches for wood fiber from trees, logs, fences, cardboard left by the side of the road. She builds a home by stripping out the insides of another. Her jaws are strong and she chews fibers to a soft pulp. To build the walls of her home she spits out what she has ground down to nothing. She empties herself to house others. The queen exists in an endless act of leaving, searching, only to be compelled back, called home” (42).
Montgomery then relates how a wasp, simply by making a home for themselves, impacted her own new home with an infestation—the same home she wanted to leave, just as wasps abandon their home each season.
“Soon it is impossible to escape the sound of the growing threat. Buzzing builds along with a bubble beneath the balcony where I sit to escape [...]
I want to escape my husband, who insists we stay here and call it home. We have become strangers here and the longer I stay, the more I feel a stranger to myself. I want to escape the house he insisted we buy as though this house would save our marriage” (41).
Montgomery’s ability to weave such lessons about the physical world and natural phenomena into the personal essays of discovery and loss, offers a glimpse into her sensitivity and intellectual prowess, all the while reflecting on the state of society.
Throughout Halfway from Home it becomes evident that Montgomery is a scholar with a skill for effectively offering numerous lessons that stimulate the mind yet pull on the heart strings. The book concludes with a gut-wrenching final chapter of watching her father slowly deteriorate due to illness. Although Halfway from Home explores many themes and relationships, it is ultimately a cathartic series of essays of how a little girl, who loves her father through all his imperfections, travels the country, grows into a woman, and returns home to be by his side in his final hours.
December 8, 2025
wasnt a fan of all the essay, but the connection to her dad, the book dedication to him, the essay abiut him, the essay about shootings, her family situation, the way she weaves in trauma and pain into her writing....
"missing you is a story i am still trying to tell" beautiful
not the biggest fan of essay collection books, but this was a cool collection - such a unique life the author has lived
splitting homes in cubicles to fit all the adopted and troubled siblings.. so much so she didn't even know them. what is home then? could she feed her parents the food they didn't have when she was little?
"missing you is a story i am still trying to tell" beautiful
not the biggest fan of essay collection books, but this was a cool collection - such a unique life the author has lived
splitting homes in cubicles to fit all the adopted and troubled siblings.. so much so she didn't even know them. what is home then? could she feed her parents the food they didn't have when she was little?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 11, 2023
I savored this beautiful collection of essays. Montgomery's writing is thoughtful, empathetic, lyrical, and intensely personal. This book broke my heart and stitched it back together, and I am a better person for having read it.
January 5, 2024
NAMED "2022 IMPRESSIVE INDIE BOOK" BY INDEPENDENT BOOK REVIEW
A 2022 RUMPUS PROSE GIFT GUIDE SELECTION
According to Kirkus, “Simultaneously beautiful and tragic, nostalgic and despondent…Brilliant.”
In "Halfway from Home," Montgomery blends lyric memoir with lamenting cultural critique, examining contemporary longing and desire, sorrow and ache, searching for how to build a home when human connection is disappearing, and how to live meaningfully when our sense of self is uncertain in a fractured world. Taking readers from the tide pools and monarch groves of California, to the fossil beds and grass prairies of Nebraska, to the scrimshaw shops and tangled forests of Massachusetts, Montgomery holds a mirror up to America and asks us to reflect on our past before we run out of time to save our future. "Halfway from Home" grieves a vanishing world while offering—amidst emotional and environmental collapse—ways to discover hope, healing, and home.
Blurbed by Dinty W. Moore, Kwame Dawes, Nicole Walker, Gayle Brandeis, and Melissa Faliveno, who calls "Halfway from Home" "a gorgeous, deeply felt ode to the search for belonging, to the deeply human act of seeking to find a place we might call our own."
A perfect read for nostalgists and essayists everywhere!
A 2022 RUMPUS PROSE GIFT GUIDE SELECTION
According to Kirkus, “Simultaneously beautiful and tragic, nostalgic and despondent…Brilliant.”
In "Halfway from Home," Montgomery blends lyric memoir with lamenting cultural critique, examining contemporary longing and desire, sorrow and ache, searching for how to build a home when human connection is disappearing, and how to live meaningfully when our sense of self is uncertain in a fractured world. Taking readers from the tide pools and monarch groves of California, to the fossil beds and grass prairies of Nebraska, to the scrimshaw shops and tangled forests of Massachusetts, Montgomery holds a mirror up to America and asks us to reflect on our past before we run out of time to save our future. "Halfway from Home" grieves a vanishing world while offering—amidst emotional and environmental collapse—ways to discover hope, healing, and home.
Blurbed by Dinty W. Moore, Kwame Dawes, Nicole Walker, Gayle Brandeis, and Melissa Faliveno, who calls "Halfway from Home" "a gorgeous, deeply felt ode to the search for belonging, to the deeply human act of seeking to find a place we might call our own."
A perfect read for nostalgists and essayists everywhere!
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews