Speaking of Home....

A few years ago, I wrote a book and called it A Road Of My Own.

An independent book publisher said that the book resonated with her and she wanted to publish it. She loved it, she said. But then came the sticking point--the title. "Nobody will buy a book with that title," she said.

But look!  Sandra Cisneros' book is called A House of My Own!

An Anything "of my own" resonates with women of my generation. We borrowed it from a writer from the previous generation, Virginia Wolfe--who wrote that a woman "should have money and a room of her own."  Today, that sounds so obvious you might wonder (if you're younger) why that set off sparks in the collective imagination of us Baby Boomers, but it did.

The zeitgeist of the Sixties was protests and rebellion, Hippies and rock music, MS Magazine, birth control, and women breaking out of molds of all kinds.  Unknown women were writing memoirs and women were reading them with great interest, starting--for me--with Anne Morrow Lindberg's Gift From the Sea, May Sarton's  Journal of Solitude.   The genre of memoir flowered like the zinnias and pansies painted on vans, cars and buildings.

I like to imagine the unlikely possibility that Sandra Cisneros was in the same college classroom I was in when a professor read the words of Virginia Wolfe: "Every woman writer should have money and a room of her own."  I like to imagine that Sandra was one of the many female English majors in that room who reached into their book bags and pulled out cigarettes in unison, wanting to inhale those words with smoke and menthol.

I was already married.  The prospect of having a place of my own had passed its expiration date, at least in that decade.  But I was intrigued the idea of independence and not having to run every decision by the man.

"The man" could be a husband, a belief, a job, or even other women--anything or anybody that dictated what we could do.  When we're not being who we are, when we're consenting to changes we don't really want (in our book titles or anything else) we feel homesick.

Even though it took me 28 years to act on my rebellion full force, a part of me began leaving the wrong house at that moment, in that college classroom at St. Mary's.   I knew that someday I'd have a house that would feel like home, and I began building a small house of many colors long before I had it in real life.