A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home

by Frances Mayes Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

With the whole world to choose from, what are those tangible and intangible reasons we live where we do? And what makes a place a home?

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ¿ A lyrical and evocative collection of personal stories from the author of Under the Tuscan Sun, in which the queen of wanderlust reflects on the comforts of home.

“Personal, warm, and lovely . . . a charming read. The book feels like a warm conversation with your most thoughtful, curious friend.”-Garden & Gun

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD ¿ VERANDA BOOK CLUB PICK

“Where you are is who you are.”

Though Frances Mayes is known for her travels, she has always sought a sense of home wherever she goes. In this poetic testament to the power of place in our lives, Mayes reflects on the idea of home, from the earliest imprint of four walls to the startling discoveries of feeling the strange ease of homes abroad, friends' homes, and even momentary homes that spark desires for other lives. From her travels across Italy to the American South, France, and Mexico, Mayes examines the connective tissue among them through the homes she's inhabited.

A Place in the World explores Mayes's passion for and obsession with houses and the objects that inhabit them-books, rich food, gardens, beloved friends, and transportive art. The indelible marks that each refuge has left on her and how each home influenced the next serve as the foundations of the book's chapters.

Written in Mayes's signature intimate style, A Place in the World captures the adventure of moving on while seeking comfort in the cornerstone closest to all of us-home.

Editorial Reviews

OCTOBER 2022 - AudioFile

Cassandra Campbell’s melodious tone and deliberate pace seem created for the figurative language and lyricism of this audiobook. Campbell’s eloquent intonation syncs beautifully with Mayes’s philosophical musings on place, home, and family. Mayes built her considerable reputation as a memoirist by sharing her wanderlust and love of all things Tuscan, especially in her memoir UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN. In this new work, her memories sail from her Southern roots to her passion for restoration, which is expressed when she creates a home in North Carolina and then another in Cortona, the Italian hill town where her now famed villa sits. The work includes fine asides on Southern writers and cucina povera (poor cooking). Campbell shares Mayes’s recipes and soul-enhancing stories, while capturing her warm heart. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 05/30/2022

Novelist Mayes (See You in the Piazza) delivers a soulful meditation on “what home means, how it hooks the past and pushes into the future” in her spellbinding latest. She examines the question through an evocative tour of her homes: there’s Chatwood, with its demanding yet rewarding rose garden in Hillsborough, N.C. (“As much as you own an old house and garden,” she ruefully muses, “it owns you”); Bramasole, the Tuscan villa in Cortona, Italy, immortalized in her hit 1996 memoir Under the Tuscan Sun; and her childhood Georgia home, a place that conjures memories of her mother’s cooking (the mouthwatering recipes for which are sprinkled throughout). Elsewhere, temporary dwellings induce reflections on life changes: cooking lessons at Simone Beck’s “honey-colored house” in Provence, for example, inspired Mayes to enroll in graduate school and begin a career as a teacher and writer. As she meanders through her memories, poignant takes on transience and mortality mingle with tributes to the people who bring her homes their vitality: friends, family, and Italian neighbors who drop off gifts of fresh ricotta, wine, eggs, zinnias, and tomatoes. “For my part,” Mayes writes, “these gifts give me a chance to feel at home in the world.” This rich testament to the pleasures of wanderlust and permanence is a gift as well. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

Awesome.”—AARP
 
“Personal, warm, and lovely . . . a charming read.”—Garden & Gun

“A Place in the World is an homage of sorts to the South, where [Mayes] grew up. . . . The experience is both a homecoming and a reckoning with the past.”—The Washington Post

“Sparkling . . . There are so many lovely descriptions of Mayes’ houses in A Place in the World, but this is not a book about buildings . . . It’s about the concept of home, that intangible thing . . . It’s a whirlwind home tour and homage to friendship . . . A beautiful, thought-provoking read.”—BookPage, (starred review)

“Mayes delivers a soulful meditation on ‘what home means, how it hooks the past and pushes into the future’ in her spellbinding latest. She examines the question through an evocative tour of her homes. . . . This rich testament to the pleasures of wanderlust and permanence is a gift.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Vivid and heartfelt . . . [Mayes’] writing is infused with this rare communal quality. A Place in the World is certainly a charming and tasteful anthology of particular spaces, but it is so much more.”—Bookreporter

“Another lush account of family and place . . . The writing is characteristically intimate, as if she is sharing her thoughts and feelings with a dear friend, and she employs eloquent and detailed descriptions, creating a wonderful sense of place. A can’t-miss hit for Mayes fans.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Mayes, known for her wanderlust, stops and takes into consideration a place key in people’s lives. In her essays, [she] examines the concept of home and how people gravitate to the places and people that mean the most, even in a foreign landscape.”—Library Journal

Library Journal

03/01/2022

With Animal Joy, poet/psychoanalyst Alsadir, a National Book Critics Circle finalist for the collection Fourth Person Singular, gets serious about studying the importance of laughter (30,000-copy first printing). Long-listed for the National Book Award and a Granta Best of Young American Novelists, Ball was inspired by French writer/artist Édouard Levé's memoir (written at age 39) to offer his own frank Autoportrait in his 39th year. In 1920s Paris, Kiki de Montparnasse was a model, muse, and friend to cultural greats and an artist, cabaret star, and driving force in her own right, as Braude (The Invisible Emperor) highlights in Kiki Man Ray. With Eliot After "The Waste Land," award-winning scholar/poet Crawford follows up his highly regarded Young Eliot (10,000-copy first printing). Standing as both memoir and memorial, Black Folk Could Fly is a first selection of personal nonfiction from the late author/mentor Kenan, whose award-winning works powerfully communicate his experience of being Black, gay, and Southern. Lowell's Memoirs collects the complete autobiographical prose of the great poet, including unpublished early work (10,000-copy first printing). What is home but A Place in the World, and Tuscany celebrant Mayes's new book explores what home really means in all its variations. As Morris explains in her first book of nonfiction, she came to the writing career launched with the multi-million-copy best-selling The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Listening Well (50,000-copy first printing). Composer of the Tony-nominated musical Once Upon a Mattress, author of the novel Freaky Friday and the follow-up screenplay, and chair of the Juilliard School, Rodgers has a lot more to discuss in Shy than being the daughter of Richard Rodgers (25,000-copy first printing). Addressed to Wohl's brother Bobby, who died in 1965, As It Turns Out reconstructs the life of their sister, the iconic actress/model Edie Sedgwick made famous by Andy Warhol (30,000-copy first printing).

OCTOBER 2022 - AudioFile

Cassandra Campbell’s melodious tone and deliberate pace seem created for the figurative language and lyricism of this audiobook. Campbell’s eloquent intonation syncs beautifully with Mayes’s philosophical musings on place, home, and family. Mayes built her considerable reputation as a memoirist by sharing her wanderlust and love of all things Tuscan, especially in her memoir UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN. In this new work, her memories sail from her Southern roots to her passion for restoration, which is expressed when she creates a home in North Carolina and then another in Cortona, the Italian hill town where her now famed villa sits. The work includes fine asides on Southern writers and cucina povera (poor cooking). Campbell shares Mayes’s recipes and soul-enhancing stories, while capturing her warm heart. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2022-05-28
The bestselling author returns with another lush account of family and place.

In her international bestselling book Under the Tuscan Sun, Mayes chronicled the challenges that she and her husband, Ed, encountered while renovating an abandoned Tuscan villa called Bramasole. In her latest exploration of “the meaning of home,” she focuses primarily on her own homes, including Bramasole, her childhood home in the town of Fitzgerald, Georgia, and Chatwood, the house she purchased and remodeled near Hillsborough, North Carolina, a place “with an intense sense of community.” After living in San Francisco for many decades, Mayes decided to return to the South “after a long quarrel with the place,” instigated by “racism, sexist zeitgeist, anti-intellectualism, self-satisfaction. Men who refer to ‘my bride’ after forty years of marriage.” Of course, “those still hover, but [Hillsborough], intolerant of such stupidity, is aspirational.” While living in California, Mayes missed the Southern floral scents of magnolia, gardenia, honeysuckle, and jasmine, and she frequently discusses how foods and accents can signal a feeling of home. Regarding Bramasole, she muses that the hospitality she has experienced at the Italian table is similar to her Southern traditions. Mayes also explores temporary residences that she has occupied, including homes of friends and vacation homes in various locations, including Capri, Provence, and San Miguel de Allende. Despite her feelings of wanderlust, the author asserts that she seeks “home” wherever she travels, and her feelings are “visceral.” When she feels it the most, she revels in “an immediate, illogical bonding.” As she explored in her previous books, she is “always looking for what shapes the people of a particular spot on Earth” and “how the land, history, and climate act to form the people into who they are.” The writing is characteristically intimate, as if she is sharing her thoughts and feelings with a dear friend, and she employs eloquent and detailed descriptions, creating a wonderful sense of place.

A can’t-miss hit for Mayes fans.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178542958
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/23/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter I

A House Down South

Lighting Seven Fireplaces


2010. Chatwood captured me because I thought if I lived here, I never would want to move again. Here’s the musical crystal ball: Shake it and snow swirls. The place never will change. The sturdy farmhouse, anchored by four chimneys, stands on a gentle rise. Above the front porch, the windows are not symmetrical. I like that. The roof is ugly and we will replace it with metal. There is a hidden hive, and I put my hand on the kitchen wall and feel the boards hum. The Eno River runs by, and I love the murky, tannic smell of rivers. On the edge of the woods a fresh stream jets out of the ground, cold and holy, and a tumbled stone foundation remains of the old springhouse, where generations kept their food chilled. And so I settled in, convinced that I’d grabbed a star out of the sky.

As fires always roar, and rain pours, so do farmhouses ramble. The porch running the length of a room converts into a sunroom, a favored spot on winter mornings. A bathroom becomes a closet, and a new bath is added. The lean-to shed converts to a kitchen. The floor plan sprawls like tiles on a Scrabble board. Add, subtract, multiply, divide: The attic becomes a reading room, another attic makes a good study. The house groans but accommodates.

From my upstairs window, I see a brick-walled three-room rose garden, a nymph statue that looks lascivious, and, beyond, the pleasing meadow stretching to the river. I took down a view-blocking, half-dead tree and planted camellias. This spring, I have a large half-moon cleared for a wildflower garden. Already a plot is turned over and a bench placed for viewing the blooms. Anticipation is half of gardening’s pleasures.

If an old house is a book to read—and it is—the upstairs study may be my favorite chapter in this house’s long history. In the 1920s, the paneled room where I’m writing served as a fifteen-by-twenty-foot schoolhouse. An ancient neighbor recalled, “When the Altvaters moved in [1937], there were still at least a dozen school desks, homemade pine boards with the seat for the next desk attached to the front, and pigeonholes on the desktops for pencils, ink, and erasers. Set in rows, the back desks used chairs along the wall.” I’m charmed that a Miss Sally Miller was the teacher. I can see Miss Miller in flower-sprigged navy dress and white collar, a dozen farm children wearing overalls and flour-sack pinafores. Their rough shoes and chapped cheeks. The teacher builds a fire, and the room overheats, sending out the smell of Octagon soap, chalk dust, gum erasers. They pledge allegiance to the droopy flag in the corner. They call out the multiplication table; they learn Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils because this house floats on a wave of trumpeting yellow blooms in spring. On a shelf, tin buckets hold their lunches. Cold sweet potatoes, biscuits, and syrup.

I like to conjure the long-ago children enthralled or trapped here on a late May day, close to summer vacation. When I’m stuck on a description, blanking out for a next line, staring out the window, I’m cheered to think this was where they turned the thin pages of the Bible, saw a picture of Washington crossing the Delaware, and read Kipling’s The Jungle Book. The first thing to know about living in an old house: the walls are alive.

This is not a dream study. I keep my desk, instead of a convenient one with drawers, because it reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s. Sturdy columnar legs, worn patina of walnut, and a pocked leather top the color of old claret. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, others built under the windows, are jammed with my fiction collection, which I’ve never alphabetized. (Poetry and nonfiction are kept downstairs.) I can’t find what I know I have. Despite four windows, the room is dark, and I hate gloomy rooms. I turn on the ceiling light, the two desk lamps, and the reading light beside a chair. Still not what you’d call bright, but the heart-pine walls send out a honeyed glow. On gloomy days, cozy, cozy. A fire feels cheery, especially when my two gentlemen cats choose my chairs for their naps.

The schoolroom is a relatively recent page in the saga of my house that creaks like a schooner (pegs and handmade nails working in and out) in the wind. I only can imagine most of the place’s history. What I know comes from a few articles, a deceased neighbor’s oral history, interviews, and a handful of letters in crabby handwriting that contradicts dates and sometimes veers into speculation. The earliest notes mention a Quaker named Isaac Lowe, one of a large family who held several land grants in Virginia. The land came to them in 1763 from the Earl of Chattharm or Chatthorn. I can’t read the handwriting but am spooked that the first syllable of the name was repeated in the house’s eventual name.

The first recorded house was built by other Quakers, the Faucettes, in the 1770s. When that burned, they rebuilt in 1806 or 1808 a plain but dignified Federal house of four large rooms, an attic room, and a kitchen. This is one of two of the period in North Carolina constructed for both commercial and residential space. We have two front doors because Robert Faucette, a miller, opened one into an inn and tavern, the other into his family residence. “Inn” sounds grand for the two rooms where sleepers must have piled onto corn-husk mattresses infested with mites, but each has a fireplace, mellow floors (some boards eighteen inches wide), and many-paned windows, which have bubbly glass that makes the view seem subterranean. When we remodeled the attic, we found Roman numerals carved into each succeeding beam and wooden pegs holding wall intersections together.

With frontage on the river and a quarter mile from a grist mill, traders and farmers brought their corn to be ground and had a place to stay if the water ran high. The Salisbury stagecoach came this way. General Cornwallis and his troops forded the river on February 26, 1781, en route to the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. Our narrow lane once was known as the Great Road, the Buffaloe Road, King’s Highway, and before those as a native trading path for the Occaneechi tribe. As a coach forded the river, the driver sounded a bugle to let the innkeeper know it was arriving. Maybe Mrs. Faucette (no record of her given name) served roasted venison, wild turkey, and river catfish to hungry passengers.

The grist mill, operated into the 1920s, stands intact, though its wheel has been lost. There’s a ghostly aura with a reason for that. Out walking, I always stop at a grave near the pond. Mallie Bryant, aged twelve, died in 1918. He fell out the mill’s window onto cascading water and rocks. Elsewhere, a world war raged. Around his stone, daffodils pop up every spring. Under a hump of dirt next to him lies his mother, her grave unmarked because she died by suicide, unable to go on after her boy died.

During the 1930s, our house was brought back from ruin by the Altvater family. (Altvater means “high water,” the situation that gave the earlier inn many customers.) Their daughter, Barrie, still owns the grist mill. She and her husband attached the home they built to a tiny mill keeper’s house facing the river and pond.

Barrie’s parents, Peggy and Vernon Altvater, added a wing onto the Coach House, as Chatwood was then called. At the southwest corner, Vernon attached another dwelling known as the Naile Johnson House, also a Federal period home rebuilt with pegs that he dismantled from its original location out on St. Mary’s Road and from paneling and flooring from other old properties. The one very large room, and the upstairs over it, added space that the cramped Quaker innkeepers would have enjoyed. Can’t you feel in your shoulders and spine when you’ve entered a well-proportioned room? Heart-pine floors gleam like dark amber. A great fireplace stands at the west end, flanked by windows with wavy glass panes that fill with sunset. The raised-panel mantel, the long-waxed paneled walls with bookcases and cabinets seem to have always been there. Most interior designers would walk in and slap pale Scandinavian wash over the walls. Although I felt the same impulse at first, now I never would paint away the warmth that seems to emanate from them. Few rooms I’ve entered in my life have personified haven to me, and this is one of them. Vernon Altvater couldn’t know when he dismantled and hauled the Naile Johnson House how much pleasure he would give to someone eighty years later.

A gesture of his small son abides. On the door to the unfinished attic space that we transformed, I decipher the scrawling in crayon, barely legible: Wesley’s Office KEEP OUT. Decades later, my grandson tacked his own PRIVATE notice in the same place. (How early the instinct for one’s own sanctum occurs.) The low room, earlier, used to be the maid’s quarters. A trapdoor opened to the kitchen below, and she climbed up by a ladder kept beside the fireplace. Since the early owners were Quakers, I hope “maid” in the records did not mean an enslaved woman. No way to know.

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