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Things in Every Room
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Things in Every Room

By: Helen Longstreth
Narrated by: Helen Longstreth
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Pre-order for $42.54

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

An intimate and beguiling memoir about what we keep behind the doors of the past, how it haunts the present and what it takes to make sense of it all.

Helen Longstreth’s chaotic childhood: the relentless cycle of her father’s alcoholic relapses, the six kids coming and going, the apologies and uncertain forgiveness, the meals that bring the family back together again. But while she is studying in America, the land of her parents’ birth, her father dies – and it all comes to an abrupt end.

In the years that follow, she is drawn back to America and another world of chaotic love and alcoholic madness, dying fathers and lost boys. The same problems in a new arrangement.

Ten years after her father’s death, Helen returns to her childhood home to spend a rainy summer with her mother. Her father’s office, his briefcase, and his desk loom beneath the leaking roof. At last, she begins to open the drawers…

'Beautifully considered' Sophie Elmhirst

'A revelatory true story about love in all its forms' Dizz Tate

'A wise, empathetic tale of addiction, love, and family strength' Frances Wilson

‘Tragic but funny and with an eye for telling detail that few writers can match’ Blake Morrison

'I read it with pleasure and admiration' Chetna Maroo

© Helen Longstreth 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 Cultural & Regional Dysfunctional Families Grief & Loss Parenting & Families Personal Development Relationships Women Funny

Critic Reviews

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 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)
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)
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)
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)
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 wise, empathetic story of levity and love when growing up around addiction and mental illness (Alan Davies)
A beautiful heart-wrencher of a memoir – valiant, vulnerable, riddled with grief and drenched in love (Nicci Gerrard)
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)
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