The Staircase in the Woods

“‘Friendship is like a house,’ she said to him, his head cradled in her lap. ‘You move into this place together. You find your own room there, and they find theirs, but there’s all this common space, all these shared places. And you each put into it all the things you love […] And this friendship, this house, it’s a place of laughter and fun and togetherness too. But there’s frustration sometimes. Agitation. Sometimes that gets big, too big, all the awful feelings, all that resentment, building up like carbon monoxide. Friendship, like a house, can go bad, too.’”

The first chapter begins in medias res, showing a brief glimpse of a pivotal scene that will not arrive until much later in the narrative. In this moment, as an adult Lore watches over Owen, she introduces the idea that houses can witness trauma and become just as warped by cruelty as the humans who perpetuate it and those who endure it. By likening friendship to a house, the author establishes the fact that the entire novel is essentially an allegory for the universal battle that people must wage against traumatic experiences in order to regain control of their own traumatized psyches. The concept of friendship is also bound tightly into this dynamic, foreshadowing the fact that the friends will have to confront all that has “gone bad” in their lives and their bond before they can properly move on. This passage also highlights The Duality of “Home” as a place of comfort and pain.