Some Can’t Help But Succumb: “The Family That Carried a House on Their Backs,” by Sammie Downing
Fairytales are not just for children but can also bring comfort to adults; this seems to be a growing mentality in literature. While big publishers like Doubleday appear to have jumped onto the bandwagon more recently, with their support of author Erin Morgenstern, smaller literary journals and presses, like Fairy Tale Review, have known this all along. Sammie Downing’s The Family That Carried a House on Their Back builds on this interest in showing the serious side of fairytales. The novella is a discussion about our understanding of duty and how family dynamics shape individual identity in allegorical form, and although there is little to no mystery as to what events like the Father’s transformation refer to, this is not so much a downside as it is a comfort, a reassurance that there is a way to express grief and healing in a way that can be simultaneously unique yet universal.
The Family That Carried a House on Their Back is a third-person account of the events that occur in one family, with a focus on Miriam, the eldest of two daughters, at a time when she still “believed she was really half-boy-half-water-nymph, and no one yet wanted her for anything more than her energy and her skill of building fortresses out of sticks. She did not know yet that this was a time that would end.” The story revolves around Miriam’s negotiation between duty and desire as she wants “to live a life outside of binary rules […] to recode all Housebearers, her mother, baby Essie […] to rip lanyards from hips, locks from flesh,” as her decision that ends up disturbing the family dynamic begs the question of whether doing the “right thing” is a universal notion and always, truly, the best thing to do.
While there is a certain closure at the end of the novella, it is by no means a rigid tale that resists its own interpretation or extension beyond the official end by its readers. It is a novel about growing up but in a different vein than the fantastical adventures of Wendy Darling, Alice, Dorothy, and the like. In The Family That Carried a House on Their Backs, the dream world is not so much the escape from reality as much as it is the dark and enticing underbelly of it that some can’t help but succumb the way that Father did, “desperately wish[ing] he was unfit, unequipped for his obligations. Then it wouldn’t be called running away. Then he wouldn’t have to accept that at one point he had had a choice, Housebearer or Wild Things, and that he’d chosen wrong.”
Perhaps the most fascinating part of The Family That Carried a House on Their Back is the systems and laws that Downing creates in her novella that work within the pages of the novella but can also be easily transposed onto our contemporary society. The Hollow, the Wildness, and the Wild Things are all open terms even within the context of the novella, just like the “Father-holds-key-Mother-holds-lock-lock-holds-House” comparison is more complex than the surface-level associations they conjure up. These are terms that invite to contemplate their multifaceted nature and my favourite example of this were three short lines that are easy to overlook if one is swept up in the narrative. Downing writes: “Mother had to leave them. Their aunt was having her first baby. Housebearers were required to attend new births[.]”
My biggest takeaway from The Family That Carried a House on Their Backs was this short passage, even though much of Miriam’s behaviour and her thoughts resonated with both my past- and present-self. It was in these lines that I found a sense of faith and comfort, for no matter how complex, and at times problematic, the relationships between mothers and daughters and sisters are, Downing shows us that it is these very relationships that become nodes and lead us to other relationships and the formation of a chosen family, and it is through speaking about trauma, whether realistically or allegorically, that we find comfort in knowing that we’re not alone.
