Seven years ago, I started the blog McMansion Hell to document—and deride—the endless cosmetic variations of this uniquely American form of architectural blight. I’ve mostly tackled prerecession McMansions, just for the novelty of houses both dated and perched on the ugly/interesting Möbius strip. But I worry that I’ve actually reinforced the idea that McMansions are a relic of the recent past. In fact, there remains a certain allure to these seemingly soulless suburban developments, and, more specifically, their construction and inhabitation. Increasing interest rates, inflation, and supply chain disruptions notwithstanding, the McMansion is alive and well. Far from being a boomtime fad, it has become a durable emblem of our American way of life.
Family after family hid their past. Some would not discuss their suffering even with the husbands or wives who had witnessed it. Others told brothers and sisters to forget the events that had scarred their childhood. Sometimes, scared by psychotic episodes or anxious at strange obsessions, adult sons and daughters brought their parents directly to psychiatrists.
More often, patients came for physical ailments that had found no relief. They had seen that speech had unimaginable consequences and that a surface harmony, however tenuous, should not be broken. Silence was safety, however dearly bought. The misery stretched back fifty years and ran onwards; you could not see its end. The trauma would not die with its victims: it had already replicated itself in their children, and their children’s children. Like cancer cells, it could not mature, only reproduce itself, mutating in grotesque immortality.
I wondered what truths and demons glimmered in the polar night, and what that night might reveal to a visitor. When the pilot announces that we’ll be landing shortly, the full moon appears suddenly in the middle of a window across the aisle, but the horizon has disappeared. I imagine the sea and sky as different shades of dark to orient myself, to correct the sensation that I’m falling.
In 2019, the gentle rhythm of a normal summer’s day was shattered by Iris’s death in an accident on the family farm in Somerset. Goldsmith’s world was thrown into disarray. He recounts those final, awful hours in quiet, careful prose that nevertheless lays bare their gut-wrenching agony.
The resulting shock and grief fuel a relentless pursuit to understand why. He seeks out other grieving parents. Their conversations are moving and enlightening and show the repercussions of loss over decades. He explores different religious beliefs about death and the afterlife, even engaging with a psychic medium. Finally, he experiences an intense ayahuasca ritual, the visions furnishing him with the intriguing title of the book.