Using spaces she has called home -- a Victorian house on the Atlantic sea-coast, a cramped college dorm, a sunlit Los Angeles house, a Parisian garret, a crowded Florida sickroom, a tiny apartment in Manhattan -- as a means of tracking the bittersweet arc of her life, Suzanne Fox writes a luminescent memoir of the central role home plays in women's lives.

"In the complicated working-through of the equation of my life I have always kept my home as the constant: the citadel-rock that stays dry even in a tidal wave, the sanctuary that cannot be breached. "Readers will recognize the complex havens -- of safety, but also of stifling enclosure -- that the book's homes represent. With sensual images that will conjure memories of one's own dwellings, Home Life turns the familiar coming-of-age theme inside out, discovering in a traditionally female domain -- the home and the relationships within it -- way to trace a woman's