At home: a domestic space odyssey

Mona Chollet

(La Découverte, 330 pages, 2015)

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Mona Chollet describes herself as a “stay-at-home journalist,” an embarrassing oxymoron that she often has to explain. At Home is her spirited response, at once a defense of the homebodies of the world and a sprawling investigation of home as a concept whose significance extends far beyond the private realm. With her vivid intellectual curiosity and natural wit, Chollet interweaves an eclectic variety of sources—personal reflections, memoirs, American TV series, statistics, international news briefs—to pull us into an invigorating and multifaceted exploration of what being “at home” means today.

While her colleagues are eager to leave on exotic assignments, Chollet blossoms within the confines of a limited geography, finding fulfillment in “the everyday, the ordinary, not its suspension.” In the first chapter, she reflects on the “overestimated virtues of perpetual motion,” leaning on the travel writing of Nicolas Bouvier and Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space to assert her own preference for sedentariness. “Home sweet home” is not just a cozy retreat shielding us from the turmoil of the world and a haven for irresponsible idleness—it is also a place, Chollet argues, where the social tensions of the moment are impossible to ignore.

In the subsequent chapters, Chollet broadens her field of vision. First, she addresses how the arrival of the Internet has radically transformed the experience of being home alone; then, she explores the quest for a space we can call home, which, in a time of widespread homelessness and rising housing costs, cannot be taken for granted; and, last but not least, she discusses the extreme commodification of time, its domination of our overworked lives, and its impact on our ability to freely inhabit our homes. Chollet’s feminist sensibility leads her to revisit domesticity as a site of fiercely gendered power dynamics. She offers an original twist on the topic of housework, dismantling the distorted representations of motherhood and domestic bliss perpetuated by celebrity housewives.

Tackling a wide variety of topics, Chollet effortlessly entwines the personal and the political with a disarming mixture of seriousness and playfulness. She ends by meditating on how human beings have long used their creativity and imagination to envision and design ideal homes. Our dreams of homes, against all odds, are proof of our hope for the future.

Mona Chollet is a Franco-Swiss writer and journalist. Since 2016, she has been a chief editor at Le Monde Diplomatique. Her most recent publications include the acclaimed Sorcières: La puissance invaincue des femmes (La Découverte, 2018), soon be published in English by St. Martin’s Press, and Beauté fatale: Les nouveaux visages d'une aliénation féminine (La Découverte, 2015).