THE HOUSE
A short novel by Rachel Joll
An emotionally honest novel about family, survival, self- worth and the stories we carry into adulthood.
With moments of humour and recognition. The House explores how the past follows us and what happens when we begin to question the stories we’ve believed about ourselves.
Why I wrote The House
I didn’t write The House because I thought I had some great literary masterpiece in me. I wrote it because, after years of sitting with people as a counsellor, and quite a few years of being a fairly complicated human myself. I kept noticing something.
We build stories about who we are.
Some of those stories start so early that we don’t even remember building them. Some come from things that happened to us, things people told us, or conclusions we made about ourselves when we were far too young to know any better.
I started thinking of those stories as rooms in a house. Some are warm and familiar. Some we avoid opening altogether. And some are pretty fucked-up rooms that, somewhere along the way, we started mistaking for the whole house.
The House came from that idea.
It’s a story about the rooms we inherit, the ones we build ourselves, and what can happen when we finally start looking around and realise: this isn’t the whole house.