The Upstairs House audiobook

I mean, I had to, right?

“The Upstairs House” is a strange, bizarre and unsettling novel that examines postpartum depression. Thankfully, I didn’t have this struggle, and I thank my lucky stars. Author Julia Fine adds dimension by integrating the main character’s professional life.New mother, Megan Weiler, was involved in writing her PhD dissertation regarding children’s literature when she became pregnant. Megan struggled with writing it before she got pregnant. After having her baby, Clara, Megan’s dissertation gains a realistic role in her motherhood life.Megan begins her decline with reality when she hears noise coming from upstairs. There is no upstairs. While alone with her baby, she finds a “door” and a mysterious woman living in an apartment upstairs. Megan eventually identifies her as Margaret Wise Brown. Ms. Fine adds footnoted segments about noted children’s author Margaret Wise Brown’s (Runaway Bunny; Goodnight Moon and many others) life and the development of children’s literature. I found these tidbits of information fascinating, as I have not considered the origins of tactile children’s literature, or the origins of children’s literature. Ms. Fine is a noted feminist author, and as such, she included Margaret Wise Brown’s own struggles as a woman in a male dominated world. Additionally, Wise Brown was involved in a lesbian relationship with an actress Michael Strange and that relationship is examined in this story.Megan’s reality becomes blurry. Her husband and devoted sister notice oddities in Megan’s behavior. We, the reader, are in Megan’s head. We see what she sees and it’s very scary.I enjoyed the structure of adding historical information into a contemporary issue. Postpartum depression is a real issue with few institutions that can completely care for women who have this struggle. Plus, I learned more about Margaret Wise Brown’s own struggles as a professional author. I highly recommend this novel, but I’m not sure it’s for the general reader.

Chills. I found this book about a haunting to be haunting — unsettling, nerve-racking, worrisome, strange. I fretted over the characters when I wasn’t reading it and ached for them when I was. Loved it so very much.

From the synopsis: A provocative meditation on new motherhood—Shirley Jackson meets The Awakening—in which a postpartum woman’s psychological unraveling becomes intertwined with the ghostly appearance of children’s book writer Margaret Wise Brown.My thoughts: The Upstairs House literally gave me the chills. It’s eerie and foreboding. I worried about the characters. Megan is a new mom, and she’s often alone with her newborn. This book is imaginative and unique, one that will make you think and feel. I highlighted, I tabbed, I re-read passages as Megan navigates this world of the horrors haunting her house, alongside the challenges of new motherhood.I received a gifted copy.Many of my reviews can also be found on my blog: www.Jennifer tarheelreader.com and instagram: www.instagram.com/tarheelreader

This was absolutely wild. Megan is a new mother and is being haunted by Margaret Wise Brown (author of Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny), who is building a house inside the walls of Megan's house. OR IS SHE?As someone who suffered from postpartum depression, some of this hit way close to home. I think, had it not been sixteen years since I went off the rails, I would not have been able to read this. As it was, it was definitely upsetting, especially the way her family treated her. The truthful, and utter uselessness, of family telling her she looked terrible and then NOT OFFERING TO WATCH THE BABY SO SHE COULD SHOWER OR SLEEP made me want to smack them all! Gah! (My family was much more supportive.)And I loved the concept of it. I loved the deep dive into the life of Margaret Wise Brown and her lover, Michael Strange, who I had never heard of. I ended up on Wikipedia about halfway through the book, and wow, Fine has done her homework. I had no idea! And I own the Leonard Marcus biography that inspired a lot of this book! It just got bumped waaay up the to read list, I must say! For a while I wasn't sure I would like this book, but I ended up enjoying it immensely, even as it freaked me out. I don't know if it's categorized as horror, but it read like horror to me. And I loved the author's note at the end particularly, talking about her inspiration, and her sources, and reiterating how badly we need better postpartum care in this country.

This book is like getting invited out for a nice hike through the woods with a good friend except your forgot to bring your own shoes so you have to borrow your friend's which after about two hours you realize have all these little pebbles in them but you can't seem to find a good place to stop and shake them out and your friend's just so gung-ho out about the whole damn hike that you just keep walking and walking and the weather is good and the views within the forest are nice but then hours later when its all over and you're driving home you can't help but think that even though its nice to get out into the woods now and then the walk really was a bit too long and you're feat actually really hurt and you're left with the sneaking suspicion that your good friend might be a bit of an asshole.

a ghost story, a love story. all exorcisms are really sapphic breakups. I loved this!!!!!“In ghost stories, we generally discover what the haunting signifies. By the end of the story or the novel or the film we know who died and why they’re restless, we know that somebody disturbed some ancient orb or moved into a toxic house. But in the story of my life I couldn’t say why I was haunted, why I needed these women, in this moment, and why they needed me. There is a room, and in it are objects, and I suppose that is enough.”

"I had so much control; I had no control at all."When Megan brings her infant daughter home, she's tired and overwhelmed, ambivalent about the intense physical and psychological demands of new motherhood, and also haunted by her abandoned dissertation. When author Margaret Wise Brown starts showing up in Megan's life, it's almost a welcome reprieve from the monotony of childcare - never mind that Margaret is long dead. But when Michael Strange, Margaret's tempestuous and unpredictable lover, shows up too, Megan's life begins to unravel.I'm blown away by how Fine balances the tender, ordinary details of motherhood - the message boards, the late-night loneliness, the breast pumps and diaper changes - with an ominous and unsettling ghost story. And the insights into the publishing career of Margaret Wise Brown have given me an entirely new appreciation of the children's books she left behind. This is also an important book for its exploration of postpartum depression/psychosis, which so often goes unacknowledged beneath the illusion that new motherhood is all cozy bliss. Fine viscerally captures what it's like to have huge new responsibilities while also feeling completely vulnerable yourself, and how painfully simple it is to slip through the cracks in full view of your loved ones. This book is going to stick with me.

i’ve been impatiently, desperately, waiting for this book since the moment i finished what should be wild and saw the first description for this on goodreads, which combined everything i could wish for in a book—hauntings, motherhood, the legacies of modernist writers, bonus ghost sex. obviously i loved it—the claustrophobic horror, the reality and surreality of having a child, the humor and wickedness in megan’s thoughts (whom i loved, deeply), the empathy, the narrative structure, the deliberate weight each word possessed. if you don’t read this book we can’t be friends anymore.

Hoo, boy. I read this on maternity leave with my first kid and it was tough. It hits so close to home--the experiences Fine captures here are visceral, vivid, terrifying. An exploration of a new parent's greatest fears realized. The book is spooky and captivating--the kind I had to put down several times because of how hard it got to me. I think it's because the supernatural elements here are woven into the mundane so stealthily that the reader starts to feel as dislocated / out-of-body as the main character. Anyway, read this but proceed with caution if you're a brand-new parent.

I initially received an ARC of The Upstairs House and I was very excited to read it, because anybody who knows me knows that What Should Be Wild REMAINS one of my go-to recommendations for everybody - I think it is close to a perfect book.Unfortunately, The Upstairs House came into my life at exactly the wrong time early last year. While I was yearning to be a mother, my younger sister was about to give birth. I am thrilled for her, I love her and my niece, but it was a difficult period for me emotionally. I am, besides somebody who still very much feels the emptiness of the not-yet-a-mother position, the abandoned daughter of a mother with mental health issues, a victim in some ways, somebody with a victim complex in others, who chose to reject motherhood and maternal instincts regardless of what that might mean for her daughters. I set the book down. The ARC expired. My niece was born. My mother stopped talking to my sister after briefly loving her granddaughter, and to her own mother. I pre-ordered the book. I was coming to it now, still yearning, reckoning more and more with the fear that bad mothering can be a genetic thing. What if it was not just her, what if it was not that we were unloveable, but that it was a thing that she had left me with, that my own children would be reckoning with these feelings thirty years from now, should I be lucky enough to have them?The Upstairs House feels like it takes the stories of girls like me, girls who watched their mothers fall apart under the weight of motherhood, who became something like mothers themselves to those mothers in some ways, takes their feelings of abandonment, their fears about their own motherhood or potential motherhood, and reckons with them, turning them into horror and love and a grotesque imagining of how both of those things can exist alongside each other. Julia Fine is a master wordsmith, her language incredibly evocative because she chooses the perfect moment, the perfect scene, to include in a single sentence a word that scintillates and turns the entire passage to gold. Her writing is immediate and thoughtful, both demanding so much of you emotionally while allowing you to move through entire pages with ease before tempting you to shift your thinking again to the logical part of your brain rather than with the flood of emotions she built up through the previous scene. They are like commas, allowing you to breathe and try to find your bearing, come to grips with what you've been presented with, before plunging you down into the bathtub with both hands again. Julia's Megan is both frustrating, frustrated, and somebody to whom it is easy to become devoted. You want to protect her from her sister's insensitivity, her mother's narcissism, her father's indifference, her husband's benign cluelessness. You can feel the injustice of it even as you want to shake her for her foolishness. It is a scathing, elegant commentary on the solitude of early motherhood, of the way that society expects far too much, and yet also too little of new mothers. It lays bare the lack of support while criticizing the systems that force mothers into a motherhood bereft of any of their former self, systems that excoriate mothers for trying to hang on to any of that former self if it does not explicitly benefit the baby. The framing of the story, the pairing of despairing dissertation work, early post-partum wilderness, and the phantom love affair of two women deceased sixty years ago leaves the reader indignant, moved, and ultimately beguiled. There is no choice but to love, deeply, the three women wronged in different ways, violent and vicious in different ways. The ending, in particular, made me feel anxious, moved me, laid bare the empty not-yet-a-mother, not-anymore-a-mothered-daughter feelings that have sat heavily with me for the last six or seven years, made worse as so many others around me navigate motherhood, navigate daughterhood with a mother who has a new and precious milestone to once again mother through (how do we learn to mother if not from our own mothers?), and ultimately made me feel less alone in those circumstances, in the fears that accompany them, and in the whisper of hope that not being alone in it might, somehow, solve it if only it's possible to find a way to commune about them with others honestly. I wish Megan had not let that bird fly from her hand, but it's selfish of me to feel that way.

"I do think that sometimes it takes a recalibration to confront the obvious. It takes an escape, then a return. And this was the obvious that I'd been skirting, the ugliness I'd been avoiding, the shard of glass in the corner of my eye: I wasn't sure that I enjoyed being a mother.But maybe I did" (230).

This is my "so good it hurts" favorite 2021 read so far. Julia Fine has managed to incorporate so many elements into this smart, surprising page-turner: --including Goodnight Moon author Margaret Wise Brown as a character (a truly interesting and empathetic portrait) without being restricted by mere facts or the need to be exhaustive--wordplay, in this case, etymological references that are amusing, wise, fascinating--delightful creepiness--use of fantastical elements to capture the raw, confusing experience of early motherhood, including exhaustion and depression --use of a secondary text, a failed thesis in small fragments. (The whole "failed dissertation" subgenre never fails to amuse me. See, my latest novel. But see also: my mother, when alive, was a therapist who specifically counseled "ABD/All But Dissertation" PhD candidates, traumatized by their lack of thesis completion.)My husband read this first and couldn't shut up about how good it is. ("Stop telling me! I'm going to read it!") And now I can't stop shutting up about it, including in upcoming recommendations for Mother's Day books that capture real motherhood, including the tears and the unreality.

The Upstairs House by Julia Fine is a surreal yet honest story about motherhood, identity, and family.It focuses heavily on the postpartum period in a particular woman’s life, which will strike a chord with many. Even as a woman without children, I was pulled in by the main character’s worries and fears. Her feelings were visceral, heightening the intensity of the story. Sure, it’s a little ‘out there’ in its execution, but its themes are grounded in reality.I wouldn’t call this a horror novel, per se. It’s more unsettling – especially for new mothers or mothers-to-be (I would assume). Other than that, I’d say the story is literary fiction, with some history mixed in. I was fascinated by the lives of Margaret Wise Brown and Michael Strange, and I appreciated the research that was included.Megan’s apathy toward her husband bothered me somewhat, but you can’t deny it’s honest and raw.Overall, this was a well-written, unique, and emotional story.**Thank you Harper Books for the gifted review copy!

This book is strange and beautiful and completely original. I underlined an absurd number of wonderful sentences, but what I most loved was how physical the book is (odd, since it’s a book about a ghost.) But the physicality of motherhood always strikes me as the thing we can't hold onto as our kids get older, and some of that’s a lovely and missed physicality—like that boneless weight of a baby sleeping on your shoulder—but a lot of it is gross and painful, the sour milk smell and rolls of fat that shouldn’t be there and unwashed hair and aching back. Fine perfectly captures the complicated world of having a new baby...and she throws in some weird wonderful twists. I mean, you surely know before you pick this up whether you're inclined towards a book with the ghost of Margaret Wise Brown. If you are, you'll find this a strange, dark, compelling trip.

I loved it. And somehow the author’s note was my fave part.

"'In the 16th century the word baby meant the tiny image of oneself seen in the pupil of another person's eye.'"This book. This book was SO GOOD. How many thrillers give you chills and also bring you to tears? My copy is full of highlights because the writing is so beautiful and concise and insightful and full of depth. And original AF. I loved this book, I loved everything about it. Megan and Ben have just had their first child, Clara. Prior to Clara's birth, Megan was working on her dissertation about mid-century children's literature. So when the late Margaret Wise Brown, the legendary children's author, suddenly appears to have moved in upstairs, behind a turquoise door that wasn't there before, Megan hardly bats an eye. Megan and Margaret become friends and Margaret tells Megan she is waiting for Michael--Michael being Michael Strange, whom Margaret had a tumultuous love affair with prior to her death. Michael was an arrogant, rich socialite who thought of herself as an artist and disparaged Margaret's success. So when strange things begin to happen in Megan's condo--windows open of their own accord, fans turn on and lights brighten and dim, Megan attributes these events to Michael's ghost.As Megan struggles to find peace in her new role as a mother and simultaneously understand what Michael wants from her and Clara, the tensions just builds and builds. This novel is a haunting look into postpartum life, the relationship between a mother and her child (and a child to her mother) and the legacy we leave behind.*Please note I am quoting from uncorrected advanced review copy and changes may be made prior to publication.

In THE UPSTAIRS HOUSE, new mom Megan is haunted by the ghosts of Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, and Margaret’s volatile lover, actress and poet Michael Strange. If that amazing premise doesn’t sell you on reading this book, I don’t know what will! For most of the book, this isn’t a frightening ghost story—though it is a compelling and concerning one, as we see Megan struggle immensely with her new role as a mother. In giving herself over to the needs of her infant, she has had to essentially abandon the dissertation she was writing (of which Margaret and Michael were a part), and we watch her grapple with what motherhood means for her sense of identity. In the last quarter of the book, Megan has a “showdown” of sorts with Margaret and Michael, a series of chapters so strange and chilling and riveting that I flew right through them. As in her debut WHAT SHOULD BE WILD, Julia Fine’s writing is gorgeous. It belongs on plaques and billboards and wallpaper and tattoos. She’s once again created a completely weird, unique, and enthralling story, one that is as unpredictable as it is beautiful, and she has shed light on the simultaneous loneliness and pain and joy of motherhood, as well as the inability to untangle love from fear.