What happens when the life you thought you were going to live disappears in an instant? For SJ, the death of her husband leaves more than an empty space beside her—it leaves a life she no longer knows how to inhabit. In Tara Badstubner’s Every Room Remembers, grief becomes a journey through memory, loneliness and the difficult possibility of beginning again.
Every Room Remembers: Introduction
Every Room Remembers is the debut novel by Tara Badstubner. After a freak accident leaves SJ a childless widow, she must find the courage to resume her life and remain open to the possibilities of a very different future for her.
After providing an overview of the plot, this review will cover this debut’s strengths and weaknesses and ask which readers will find it worth experiencing.
We at WeNeedtoTalkAboutBooks.com were provided with an advanced copy in return for an independent review.
Every Room Remembers: Plot Overview
To outsiders, Sarah Jane [SJ] has been living a comfortable existence. A sought-after interior decorator, she has just landed a dream contract to redecorate The Osprey House – a relic and local landmark in her hometown of Beaufort South Carolina. Soon, she will have to depart Sleepy Hollow, New York; leaving behind her husband Wyatt and their dog Hawk and take on the enormous task of saving the old mansion.
But beneath the surface, difficulties pollute SJ’s otherwise idyllic life. What her client desires for the Osprey redesign is very much against her aesthetic. Despite saying she is a fan of SJ’s work, what Morgan seems to want is more modern minimalism to SJ’s English country. She suspects Morgan is under the influence of a domineering husband.
SJ knows a little about subordinating your dreams to the love of your husband. Wyatt has struggled with depression much of his adult life. He has largely abandoned using medication, finding it insufficient. But his condition has been a burden on their relationship and SJ’s urging him not to give up on finding a treatment only encouraged more arguing between them. Wyatt is convinced his condition is hereditary and for that reason refuses to start a family with SJ, destroying a dream of hers.
Wyatt operates his own business, Monroe Landscaping, together with his childhood friend, Mike. One day, while felling a tree limb, the limb swings back and crushes Wyatt against the trunk, killing him instantly.
Grief takes its toll on SJ; she goes through the motions of the funeral, the intrusion of family help, the use of pills to help her sleep and the drifting of days into weeks and months as she cannot bring herself to resume her former life without Wyatt. In parallel, grief resurrects the past in vivid detail. SJ dwells on the major phases of her relationship with Wyatt as well as the death of her parents.
Grief is not linear or even or tidy. If you could graph it, I’m sure it would be a wild, broken line. I vacillated between this dogged hope that he was alive, somewhere, somehow, and the near-tangible emptiness where once he’d been. As I grieved for Wyatt, somehow my more muted grief for the loss of my parents, eleven years earlier in a car wreck, surfaced as well. This still seemed so unfair: while I mourned Wyatt, I craved my mom’s caress, the way she would stroke my hair and tuck it behind my ear. I longed for the late-night fridge raids with my dad and the huge mounds of ice cream we would serve up to each other. He said ice cream was proof that there was a God.
With my parents’ deaths, I had aged ten years overnight. My gait slowed. A stranger would ask me my name or where I lived, and I would stare at their face, a long beat of emptiness between us, and then I would answer as if being pushed from behind, with a sudden awareness that something was required of me. But with Wyatt, I felt as if I’d been catapulted by some supernatural force into the future, far past fifty or sixty or even seventy years. I was eighty, at least, and my body was done, ready to leave this life. Cold all the time, and no hot tea, heating pads, or cardigans seemed to cure it. My joints throbbed, my skin taut like the skin of an old drum over the tendons in my feet and hands. Eating became a chore fraught with indecision. Nothing tempted me. I craved nothing. I tasted nothing. I slept, desperate in my delirium of imagining Wyatt sleeping beside me. My body seemed to say, Yes, let’s be done with it, yet life continued to happen. I was carried along by this biological current, unwilling, but alive in the humblest sense.
Becoming a regular of the local Wendy’s, SJ befriends Avery – the pink-haired young woman who works there. They become closer as Avery’s car breaks down and SJ offers to drive her. Avery, it turns out, is older than she might appear. She’s a twenty-five-year-old post-grad student aspiring to become a family therapist.
As more months pass, SJ’s need for substance in her life grows but her reluctance to move forward remains. Small steps lead to growing momentum and soon she is ready to face her very-behind-schedule contract. But going to Beaufort means leaving behind the home she shared with Wyatt. It means proximity to her interfering sister. It means being confronted by memories of her hometown and the boys – now men – from her adolescence.
Every Room Remembers: Thoughts
Every Room Remembers is the debut novel by Tara Badstubner. The story taps into our universal fears of the loss of a loved one followed by isolation and paralysis. Accompanying loneliness are the dangers our new solitude has made us vulnerable to. Dangers we may have forgotten when we were not alone. Urging SJ out of her stagnation are signs that come from the pressures of life, the people who care for her, and from the natural and supernatural world. If she can only be receptive to them.
Sometimes, it’s the kindnesses, when they arrive, that break you. Time and again, I had soldiered on, got up most mornings, and went to bed every night unsure of what tomorrow would bring or whether I’d have the fortitude to weather it. But I did. Somehow, I weathered it. And then, someone is kind—my sister is kind—and all the badass fortitude evaporates.
To me, Every Room Remembers’ shortcoming is that it is a very ordinary story. SJ’s journey is a familiar one that most of us, unfortunately, will likely experience in some form if we have not already. The story does contain surprises, but perhaps not enough for the heavy reader to see it as a novel with a strong point of difference.
The novel’s strength is the other side to this – because the journey is familiar it is also relatable. SJ’s grief, her self-imposed exile and immobility are responses the reader can easily identify with. We can also relate to her sometimes sullen attitude to others in her vicinity while we champion her return to a new life.
One aspect of the novel I am unsure about is the role of nature and the supernatural. It is almost tempting to say the novel contains a magical realism aspect. If you are the type of reader who is discouraged by magical realism you needn’t worry since it is a minor but poignant inclusion in the novel. So much so that I wondered if it had been underplayed.
An aspect of the novel I enjoyed was Avery. The perspective of a younger woman, a different personality to others in SJ’s life, and one who enters her life after Wyatt’s death, was refreshing amongst the cocoon of grief SJ has made for herself. I almost wished she could have had a bigger role.
Again, a seasoned reader might find some aspects of the plot of Every Room Remembers predictable and convenient. But I felt there was a larger message there. Akin to the ‘when life closes a door it opens a window’ aphorism, SJ is faced with the opportunity to create a new life that would not have been possible if her old one had endured. A difficult reality given that its cause was a tragedy she wishes could be avoided. Again, this is something we will all face in life.
There are plenty more lessons the reader can find in Every Room Remembers. The never-ending search for home; the prevalence of old wisdom; the journey through grief of gaining perspective and discovering truths. The plot arc is a well-tread one but it comes with the simple satisfaction of a good story, well-told, that ends well.
Is Every Room Remembers Worth Reading?
As I have alluded to, I think this very much depends on the type of reader you are. If you prefer novels that are literary, exotic with singular themes and characters, then this may not be for you. But if you prefer finding common humanity with characters and their relatable experiences, and a hopefully message of a life that turns a new page after tragedy, then you will find much to be encouraged by in Badstubner’s debut.