House Lights

by Leah Hager Cohen

Book Overview

Late in her twentieth year, Beatrice, who dreams of a life on the stage, is confronting a home life torn asunder. She mails a letter on the sly to her grandmother, a legendary actress long estranged from the family, sparking events that will change her life forever. Powerfully written and psychologically intricate, House Lights illuminates the corrosive power of family secrets and the redemptive struggle to find truth, forgiveness, and love.

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393332721
• ISBN13: 9780393332728
• Release Date: July 2008
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 330 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Excellent story written w/ the best descriptive details

I really enjoyed your book, House Lights. It was one of the most well-written books I have ever read. It seems that family life often does come full circle, and I found it interesting in how you were able to write in such detail about how that happens for your main character, Bea. I have so many favorite parts, but one of my favorite phrases you used was in the last part of the book where you were describing Bea's thoughts in reflecting on her memories of her father..."whether it be memory's dirty trick of distortion or maturity's gift of clarity". I love that description so much that it should be a refrigerator magnet! Great writing! I look forward to reading more of your work. -AnnMarie Craven (yes, from Nyack)

a nuanced, eloquent, accomplished novel

Cohen is an underappreciated talent who has delicate, subtle powers of observation and who narrates with brilliant clarity the inner ways of the heart. This is a book about self-discipline and recklessness, about maturity as both a great loss and a great achievement, and it is written with almost unberable tenderness and kindess.

"They wanted me to learn things without having to assume responsibility for telling me."

Sometimes it is only upon reflection in our more mature years that it is possible to realistically assess the destruction of innocence, peeling away the layers of denial that once seemed so vital in interpreting family dramas. To review your past, your family, with an unerring and deliberate eye is a task fraught with danger, stripping fact from fiction, the threads of truth tangled in childhood memory. When Beatrice Fisher-Hart arranges to meet with her long-estranged maternal grandmother, Margaret Fourcey, a former actress of some repute, she believes it is only to further the dream of becoming an actress; but as Beatrice attends her grandmother's evening salons, the gatherings become more than opportunity, rather a place of psychic nourishment and reconnection with a woman she has never known. Beatrice's parents, both therapists, Dr. and Dr. Fisher-Hart, combine their offices and living quarters in their Boston home, but the genteel façade of professionalism is under assault, Beatrice's father, Jeremy, accused of sexual harassment. Closing ranks, the Fisher-Hart's present their usual calm mien to the world; prompted by the shocking revelation of Jeremy Hart's indiscretion, Beatrice suddenly remembers an incident from her childhood, questioning, little by little, the rarified and controlled atmosphere of her environment; later she learns of other such shameful incidents, at nineteen barely able to fathom the significance of this new information. A revolt against family secrets slowly emerges as Beatrice joins a theatre workshop directed by Hale Rubin, one of the accomplished members of Margaret's salon. Increasingly, Beatrice views her life as a series of acts, achingly self-conscious as the house lights "suddenly illuminate the larger reality in which a play was being staged." On a painful journey of self-discovery that demands an honest recounting of family dynamics, Beatrice must at last acknowledge her parents' feet of clay and the role of a daughter in transition to adulthood, flirting with a serious romance that calls into question everything she has believed about herself. The cultivated, civil atmosphere of Beatrice's relationship with her parents is intimately examined, doubts surfacing about the carefully hoarded memories that have defined her existence in a well-ordered world gone out of kilter with her Jeremy's intemperate actions. Although much of the novel seems too self-conscious, too perfectly sculpted, Hager injects the final pages with an immediacy and authenticity of surprising depth, the jagged emotions of a broken man who cannot ask for help, the uneasy peace between mothers and daughters, the healing power of unconditional love, and the winding path through a wilderness that has engulfed this small family. Beatrice's coming-of-age is handled with delicate precision, through the pitfalls of the past to a more navigable present, a plunge into the world of the theater and a marriage that is outside convention. Treading c