The history of this house

Abstract

'The History of this House' is a collection of personal essays focusing on one woman's attempt to explain her profound need to preserve and understand cultural and family history. The collection explores this theme as the narrator excavates a Native American burial mound and postulates that her chosen profession makes symbolic headstones in an endeavor to celebrate and immortalize the past. Her need to identify with the past is also apparent in other essays as she assists with an autopsy, investigates her sexuality through religion, searches for her biological mother, and comes to terms with her position as a female athlete in a family of male baseball players. She realizes at a family auction that though her family tries to keep the past alive by buying and selling tangible goods; she can never live in the past, but can only preserve and learn from it.