Spoilers!
Trauma is a kind of haunting, a haint within us, just not of the supernature but rather all too real. Rivers Solomon’s 2024 book, Model Home, unearths the way in which trauma reverberates through the years and within a family, most aversely, generationally. To read Solomon’s book is to want to quote every other sentence, such is the acerbic nature of their observances. Peel it all away, though, and Solomon’s book is about what it means to be in a body and its inherent weirdness, to interact with others (and that inherent weirdness!), and to be alive in this unyieldingly beautiful, fucked up world. To be alive is to accept, or at least understand, the loved and unloved, the grandeur and the trauma, are inextricably linked.
The Maxwell siblings believe they grew up in a haunted house. Which, in a very real way, it was haunted inasmuch as they were a well-to-do Black family trying to live in a gated white community in Texas, and the white residents didn’t want them there. It was the gated community, the nefarious HOAness of it all, that was haunted, a reflection of America’s original sin, rather than anything to do with ghosts or the Maxwells. Nevertheless, the oldest sibling, Ezri, who has a child named Elijah, is scarred by it. On their first day at the new home, Laurie, their neighbor stops by. I was already prepared for her HOAness, if you will, and her I’m-not-racist-I-just-care-about-the-character-of-the-neighborhood vibe, but she was so much worse and pernicious than even that initial judgment.
Ezri and their two siblings, Eve and Emanuelle, are estranged from their parents. Their mother was hard, controlling, aloof, bewildering, and ultimately, stubborn since she kept them in a home they believed haunted out of a sense of pride. Their father was largely absent. Despite all this, the three siblings reunite when it seems like their parents need them again. However, when Ezri goes to the house, their parents are dead. The police and reporters believe it’s a murder-suicide situation, with their mother the likely culprit. When Emanuelle, who is an Instagram influencer, uses her platform to push back against this narrative, arguing that the house is haunted, a TV interviewer wonders if the Maxwell children were dealing with a mother who suffered from Munchausen syndrome (a mental condition where the suffer fabricates or exaggerates their medical issues to gain sympathy) or Munchausen syndrome by proxy (the caretaker/mother faking it to control the child abusively). Either or both could track with what they understand about their mother, but Ezri is hiding a truth of their trauma from Emanuelle. Eve knows it, too. The truth? The house is not haunted. Their mother is not a child abuser. Instead, Laurie was orchestrating all those seemingly supernatural, violent events, along with conspirators in the neighborhood, to force the Maxwells out of their home. Worse still, much worse, she was sexually abusing Ezri.
In a parallel to Ezri’s trauma and the way in which it generationally unfurls itself, Elijah believes their mother to be aloof and uncaring, and seeks out a mother-like figure in Lisa, another older woman pedophile. Elijah also has body image issues. Basically, they don’t feel loved and don’t love themselves. Which makes for an ample opportunity for a would-be offender like Lisa. Fortunately, after dealing with Laurie, the Maxwell sisters learn about all this and largely extricate Elijah from the situation before anything too harmful occurs.
Through it all, Ezri comes away realizing the power of being alive, the power of connection to their siblings and their daughter, and that what happened to all of them, and the fiction they erected as children to understand it — that their house was haunted — was a way of trying to reclaim their bodies and their selves, their trauma, but it doesn’t have to forever define them. Before all this, Ezri explained how they felt irretrievably broken, as if their very essence was corrupted. They said they’d been diagnosed with BPD (borderline personality disorder), OSDD (other specific dissociative disorder), and so on. “All those letters, but they spell only one thing: hole. That word gets to the muscle and bone of it. I am something no wants to fall down.” They saw themselves as unlovable. But that alphabet soup of disorders and maladies need not define us. If I could extrapolate the closing moments to the book specifically to this point: to be alive supersedes those diagnoses.
Perhaps, though, more distressing for Ezri, which they’re self-aware of, is how we become like our parents even when we are estranged from our parents due to how they parented us. When they’re ready to storm out over an argument with their sister, Ezri is frustrated Elijah isn’t listening to them, and their inner monologue reminds them of their parents’ words. They reflect, “History repeats and repeats because history is people, and we can reproduce only what we know, and we get what we know from our elders. The same mechanisms that facilitate language facilitate the passing on of pain.” Oof. Even when we have every intention of not passing it along, history, language, trauma, are a flowing river we cannot stymie, but only learn to swim in. You certainly can’t outrun it either, as Ezri tried, going all the way to England.
As I said, I could spend thousands of words quoting and dissecting and interpreting and pontificating on Solomon’s book — they offer such insightful, cerebral observations about what it means to be alive — but, you should just read the book. It’s that thought-provoking and in that way, as the best thought-provoking books tend to be, far more unnerving and challenging than anything supernatural could ever hope to be. Reality is always far scarier.
Milam's Musings 