Industry Reviews
A beautiful heart-wrencher of a memoir – valiant, vulnerable, riddled with grief and drenched in love
Nicci Gerrard
A revelatory true story about love in all its forms. Generous to its characters, their failing efforts and effortful failures, their determination to talk and know and touch, to be warm in a world that’s so often cold, yet the writing is never sentimental; instead, so gracefully and diligently honest, without a hint of artifice or judgement. A joyful revelation for the memoir form. I read it in a day, and reread it the next - for me, a modern classic.
Dizz Tate
Things in Every Room is written straight from the heart, like the best memoirs. Tender, compassionate and immersive, it is an intimate study of what it means to love a flawed father and survive the complex grief of losing him too young. This is one of the best memoirs I have read about the insidiousness of depression and addiction, and how it touches everyone in its orbit; it is so often the mother's strength and constancy, and the safety of the family home, which allows for healing in the end. That, and love, and the power of the imagination
Lily Dunn
A heartfelt first book about losing your father and the struggle to move on when you keep doing ‘all the wrong things’. The battle, for herself and others, is with addiction - to drink, drugs, family, work, love and ‘memories hiding under memories’. This is memoir at its most candid, tragic but funny and with an eye for telling detail that few writers can match
Blake Morrison
A wise, empathetic, and beautifully crafted tale of addiction, love, and family strength. This is a memoir I will return to and recommend
Frances Wilson
Memoir can be a dangerous form of writing. You can document your life with courage and honesty, and that is valuable. Very rarely, however, a writer transforms their own life into art. Helen Longstreth is an artist and her book takes enormous risks. It is a masterpiece
Paul Spike
So compelling, moving... it’s a real bravura thing the way her style speeds us along in a kind of wild present tense of living, embracing and wrestling with everything
Ardashir Vakil
A stunning memoir about family, addiction, and the struggle to find one's place in the world and finding one's voice as a writer
Nicholas Boggs
An arresting, distinctive self-portrait alive with the intimate rituals and chaotic spaces of family life and first loves. I read Things in Every Room with pleasure and admiration.
Chetna Maroo
Tender and compelling, this memoir captures the frantic, reeling paradoxes of life with an addict: how love, joy, and heartbreak can collide within a single mealtime; the haze between light and dark, hope and helplessness. Helen Longstreth probes the impulse to lose oneself in the lives of others and asks vital questions about suffering. Her writing is both bruising and beautiful.
Sophie Calon
A painfully honest and loving portrait of suffering, loss and re-building of family, written with the kind of self-clarity and expression that eludes most writers
Alev Scott
This is such a taut and intimate memoir. Longstreth is not afraid to wrestle with the most raw and delicate parts of life, nor to write about them with sharp honesty. But her study of her father is one of huge compassion and one you sense has filtered through many layers of thought. The result is both immediate and beautifully considered
Sophie Elmhirst
A wise, empathetic story of levity and love when growing up around addiction and mental illness
Alan Davies
Longstreth is great at observing dysfunctional people, clear-eyed and without judgment, and she can be funny too
The Times
