home away from home

then one of us must be in the wrong hotel

Jun 03, 2025

if the rolling ladder is a weekly ritual that brings you amusement or adds a new book to your nightstand then

read! - heart! - share! - comment! - or even buy me a ‘coffee’

I’ve had the immense fortune to stay in a range of diverse lodgings throughout my life. An Amtrak roomette, a Croatian grandmother’s zimmer frei. In tiny homes and agro-tourist farms, woodsy cabins, Italian villas and Italian pensions, refurbished cargo containers along with Best Westerns and Holiday Inns. From all inclusive resorts and UNESCO World Heritage Sites to Airstreams, cottages and condos to the top floor of an English pub and a Chicago whiskey bar to a Vietnamese cruise ship. I’ve stayed with another couple in a minuscule Hong Kong apartment, spent the night in a rickety old windmill and passed many a road weary evening in motor lodges and slept once, and only once, in a tent.1 Each had their own little quirks— luxuries and irritations like inexplicable outlet placements, paper thin walls and multiple light bulb temperatures, aggressively tucked in sheets, negative shower pressure and lost reservations as well as plush towels, signature scents and American Girl Doll sized toiletries, broken AC and sometimes a landline in the bathroom! I come from a family2 addicted to travel so we can always count on a Room Tour video being shared in the family feed whenever someone checks into a new spot. It elicits oohs, ahhs and, usually, much envy as they showcase every nook, cranny and oddity of their home away from home.

These temporary spaces are an escape from the everyday, a place that removes us the familiar for better or for worse. Finding comfort and safety in a space both yours and not yours is a funny thing. I so enjoy poking around a new space, squealing or lamenting its setup and I often find myself attempting dashes of reinvention in this safely short term environment. Will I finally be the sort of person who wakes with the dawn, uses the gym and charges a smoothie to the room? Obviously I will be donning the provided bathrobe, but will I also be ordering room service and pilfering the minibar or will I have a nightcap on the rooftop lounge? Will I sneak into the pool after hours?3 What movies on cable will I be excited to see that I would never deign to watch at home? How many pillows is too many pillows? Today’s books are all set in temporary accommodations, but these momentary stays leave permanent impressions.

Pack your bags, look up the check-in instructions and don’t forget your toothbrush as you find temporary lodging inside one of these.

RENTAL HOUSE by Weike Wang

In early 2021 married college sweethearts Keru and Nate decide to escape the city and spend a few weeks at a Cape Cod beach house. They specifically booked one with an extra bedroom to house both sets of their parents— ‘staggering’ their visits of course. Keru is from a Chinese immigrant family and Nate from a working class, white background so these visits provide a source of almost paralyzing anxiety as they each become someone new in the presence of their parents and in-laws. As the whirlpool of family dynamics swirl around discussions, assumptions and expectations about money, kids, career paths, race, politics, food and more, Keru and Nate are forced to confront truths about themselves as individuals and as a couple. The second half of the book takes place five years later as they take a trip to a Catskills cottage with no parents in sight. But the arrival of a different set of challenging visitors leads to unexpected events that continue to warp their marriage and sense of identity.

There is a tendency to take two halves of something and assign them equal weight. Marriage is fifty-fifty, but who said that? Who believes this to be true?

This is a quick but filling snack of a book at just over 200 pages. Its got a dry, sly matter of fact tone even when conveying absolute craziness which I found very funny. It feels sort of glancingly absurdist, but never more than a level or two above the regular world so still very grounded. The offhand zaniness lands harsh and fast at times, but still contained an emotional core that felt true, balanced and earned. We can all find something to relate too here as the family dynamics are rich and even felt too close to home at times4. Keru and Nate battle the typical conundrums and complications of modern life in sometimes bleak ways, but it wasn’t ever truly dark and the end was on the hopeful side. The parent characters are idiosyncratic even when broadly stereotypical, which I think was a specific narrative choice to draw the unique from the stereotype, and I loved the oddity of their behavior and how each communicated with their kid vs their son/daughter in-law. Keru specifically has an odd quirk when she wants to get out of situations that was a bit out there but then again, is a ‘crazy’ response not warranted inside ‘crazy’ times?

There’s an quick interlude between rental house vacations that catches the reader up to what’s been going on for Keru and Nate over the past five years which is a nice bridge to get us from here to there, connecting some threads and adding length to others. I appreciated the conversations around DINK5 life, the wrestling of one’s background into a self and a self within a couple, marrying into a family and how family shapes, comforts and confounds ourselves and others all within the claustrophobia of an escapist ‘neutral’ location. This is thoughtful, sharp, funny and full of terrifically cringey moments of familial tension.

For six months, his father lost his sense of smell and blamed allergies. His mother had severe muscle pains but declined to test or take Tylenol. Over the phone, Nate asked how they ever expected to travel to places like New York, say, to visit him and Keru, if they ignored each and every guideline. His mother said, "Then we won't travel, we'll wait it out, one day science says one thing, the next another." Nate reminded her that he was a scientist.

"Which were very proud of,” she said, but whatever science he believed in, he should also know when to keep it to himself. She wasn't pushing her science onto him; she wasn't telling him what to do. Nate explained that there was no his or her science, no one owned that word, and more importantly, she and his father weren't scientists, had not gone to school to study it, taken qualifying exams, defended a thesis that took six years to complete, done three more years of a postdoc, and was now finally on a tenure track that would take another seven years because of bureaucracy, grant funding, and because fruit-fly research was so fucking slow —since you actually had to grow the flies and catch them, and if you're trying study the social patterns among colonies, you had to observe for hours at a time, months. His final remark to his mother was "our opinions are not worth the same," after which the line went quiet. Nate thought she’d either set the phone down or hung up. Then he heard, "You forget who you're talking to, Nathan. I am your mother and we shall not discuss this anymore."

HOTEL OF SECRETS by Diana Biller

Maria Wallner is finally in charge of her family’s Viennese hotel and she has big plans to revitalize it and restore both the space and her family’s legacy after scandal and war have had their way with it. During this time of rising political tension in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the US government sends glorified accountant Eli Whittaker on a mission to Vienna to investigate mysterious goings on linked to the Hotel Wallner. As the irrepressibly competent Maria interferes with the buttoned up Eli’s mission and distracts him from the task at hand, they discover a sinister plot lurking in the shadows of the hotel that may have dangerous consequences for both of them and even for the Empire itself.

This cover is terrible and I almost didn’t read it on a matter of principle because I do judge books by their cover.6 This is a dual POV historical romance set in Vienna which was a nice change of pace since most of those tend to take place in England. Maria and Eli aren’t exactly enemies at first, but are definitely at odds in the motivation and personality department so there are delicious scenes of tension and chaos building. Eli is a no-nonsense American, a real rule follower while Maria is an ambitious Austrian dedicated to her hotel and family legacy who thrives on putting out some fires and igniting others. This is sexy, light, frothy, melodramatic fun and understands the assignment even though it isn’t anything exceptional. I spy a big case of muscling modern sensibilities into an anachronistic context, a fairly uninteresting mystery, too much damsel rescuing, a glaring timeline mistake7 and I didn’t care for the journal entry headnotes that topped every chapter but! we do get lots of classic romance elements like: self defense lessons! banter! scandal! secret past traumas! gender swapped sex lessons! frustratingly restrictive fashion! grumpy protectors and headstrong heroines! smiles that take 200 pages to occur! linen closet make-outs! constant peril! lots of instances of the protagonists being charmed against their will! If you’re looking for something escapist and spicy in an opulent setting this may fit the bill.

Did you know I do more than read and tell you what to read? I also edit podcasts AND fiction. If you’ve got an audio project that needs a skilled ear or a fiction manuscript that needs a detailedeye, send me a message or leave me a comment.

ALL FOURS by Miranda July

Our nameless narrator is a 45 year old ‘semi-famous artist’, wife and mother living in LA who tells the reader that she tries “to keep most of myself neatly contained offsite”. This severe compartmentalizing of her self begins to become a real issue so she decides to take a solo trip to New York City and is persuaded by her husband to make it a month long road trip. Off she goes on this minutely planned odyssey until she decides to stop just a few exits past her house and take refuge in a typical, drab roadside motel. In this motel room she indulges in her strangest, basest desires as she probes her mind and body for answers to who she truly is, what she truly wants and what that life would be if these were truly realized.

This book was everywhere last summer so, natural rebel that I am, I waited until this summer to read it.8 This has a conversational, diaristic voice that was often hilarious. I cackled aloud many times at the narrator’s winding thought progressions and profoundly strange, yet sometimes relatable, intrusive thoughts. I very much identified with this gem: “Are we totally sure abut the domestication of animals? Being anti-pet (pro animal!) was one of my least winning qualities.” I think the consensus is that this is one of those books you either LOVE or HATE, and it seems to come down to how you feel about this ‘unlikable’ protagonist. I, more often than not, enjoy ‘unlikable’ female protagonists and was consistently interested in this one. She felt both foreign and familiar, unique and universal in her quest of self-discovery and I honestly had no idea where this would go or how it would end. I love a ‘descent into madness’ tale and this is sort of a ‘descent into menopause’ tale through grandiose heights of self indulgence and labyrinths self delusion9 as the artist turns her perfectly valid fears into excessively manic actions that go to unexpected places. The weird can be uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be avoided. Personally, I’m trying to follow the weird more and more.

I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one's own.

It is often unsubtle and blatant, jarringly horny and even animalistic at times but it actually ended more expansive and less bleak and gritty than I expected. It actually felt a little neat and fairy-tale like towards the end which was somewhat surprising given the very questionable life decisions this woman makes. But her drastic actions and mindset are informed by her family backstory, her own medical traumas and larger societal expectations so they clicked to me and were well earned. I was enlightened, gripped, confused, repulsed, moved, amused, shocked, intrigued, embarrassed and hopeful throughout this entire story of one woman’s search for internal and external freedom and selfhood, but it may not be for everyone. Give it a try and let me know what you think10.

Did he know? On some level? Maybe he did. Maybe he was about to confess something and then I would confess and this would be the start of us finally breaking through. Unfortunate timing, since I wasn’t in the mood to break through right now. But I might feel differently in the moment, the way people who suddenly accept Jesus Christ into their heart were like, Jesus who? just seconds before being born again.