The Architecture of Childhood
Thinking about the places we called home can take us into the basement of our subconscious and towards the foundations of our psyche.

Home means many things, but we can be fairly sure of one thing: it is place. Usually, a building of some sort or a space in a building, though it can also be a vehicle, a tent, or other temporary shelter.
The home or homes we have lived in make their mark on us. And this week, if you’re game, you can find out some of the ways those spaces have shaped you.
If you’re chiefly writing to gain insights into yourself, perhaps seeking to heal past wounds, describing the place(s) you lived can feel refreshingly neutral. And yet, you probably already know that your wounds are especially attached to particular locations. If what we’re talking about is a ‘Big T’ trauma, don’t imaginatively go to that space just yet. If this is you, choose, in the writing exercise, to go first to the parts of ‘home’ that felt relatively safe.
If you’re writing a memoir, you might take this as a setting/location exercise. It’s vital for readers to have a concrete place to place the protagonist (you). I’m reminded of the striking beginning of J.M.Coetzee’s Boyhood:
That third-person narrative viewpoint, by the way, is a fantastic trick if you need to distance yourself from your childhood. If there’s trauma in your past, you can try using she/he/they instead of “I” when you (free)write. It will give you a bit of breathing space. We are not the same person we were when we were eight or fifteen. I mentioned the poetic sequence in Material, ‘Driving Without Lights,’ in my Friday post. All third person. It was far too painful to call that person “I” when I wrote those poems a few years later.
Polling Your Thoughts
Last week’s poll asked you to characterise your childhood as happy or unhappy. At the time of taking this screenshot, my sample size was a mere 37 people, and the sample is too skewed to apply to the general population (you’re all subscribed to a Substack called How To Evolve, after all!). But wow, it’s very interesting that no one said their childhood started unhappy and became happier.
Perhaps, once you get kicked off on the wrong foot, it can be difficult to recover your footing before you’re into adulthood. I can see why that would be the case. On the other hand, maybe the four-tenths of you who said your childhood was “difficult to characterise” at least saw some improvement. What will be interesting is whether, if you are taking part in the Writing Home challenge, you find at the end that your childhood is easier/harder to characterise! Mental note to repeat this poll in a few weeks!
For this week’s poll, I am asking how many homes you’ve had. This has a considerable effect on your sense of stability, though, of course, if you have very loving, stable parents, that could easily counteract the effects of moving around a lot. Still, there are the issues of possibly having to adapt to new schools, losing classmates and friends, and making new ones when existing groups are established. Let me know your answer in this poll:
I had two childhood homes that I remember (deleting the two we lived in during our year in the US, which never really earned the label “home”), and they had very different vibes. If you had more than one childhood home, you could choose to consider only the most significant or choose the two that were the most contrasting. If your count is 3+, I’ll still say, for now, stick with two so that you don’t over-burden yourself at this point (although, of course, it’s up to you). So, if you lived in more than one place you remember in your childhood, you might double up on the writing exercises. A compare-and-contrast, especially if you had a happy home and an unhappy home.
Experiment in the Present Tense
I’m going to ask you to write in the present tense. This brings the reader immediacy and intimacy (even if the only reader is going to be us, that is valuable). You might notice I slip into the present tense quite often in my memoir posts for that reason.
Because when we write our lives, this is not something irrelevant that is happening “in the past”. In some very real sense, especially if we haven’t processed our emotions around certain events, this is happening now. In addition, re-running it in the present tense can sometimes allow us access to memories we had blocked off from ourselves. Important details can become vivid.
The present tense really makes the past come alive, which is why so many historical novelists (including Hilary Mantel) have taken to using it. It is why J.M. Coetzee used it (along with the third-person narrative viewpoint) in the passage above. So, I’ll encourage you to use it in this week’s exercise and see how it works for you. You can report back to me in the comments!
[This part is just for the paid community for privacy reasons, and because these gorgeous people help keep me in my precious home, but if you’re a free subscriber, I hope you found this post interesting and/or useful even in its curtailed form; feel free to like it!
Stick around for the Friday essay, which I fear may prove a little explosive, as I tackle something that is getting my goat. I knew I should’ve kept it in the backyard!]
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