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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Annelie Geissler

THE UPSTAIRS HOUSE

Julia Fine

A haunting new novel about new motherhood and postpartum madness from the author of What Should Be Wild.
There's a madwoman upstairs, and only Megan Weiler can see her. Ravaged and sore from giving birth to her first child, Megan is mostly raising her newborn alone while her husband travels for work. Physically exhausted and mentally drained, she's also wracked with guilt over her unfinished dissertation - a thesis on mid-century children's literature. Enter a new upstairs neighbor: the ghost of quixotic children's book writer Margaret Wise Brown - author of the beloved classic Goodnight Moon - whose existence no one else will acknowledge. It seems Margaret has unfinished business with her former lover, the once-famous socialite and actress Michael Strange, and is determined to draw Megan into the fray. As Michael joins the haunting, Megan finds herself caught in the wake of a supernatural power struggle - and until she can find a way to quiet these spirits, she and her newborn daughter are in terrible danger. Using Megan's postpartum haunting as a powerful metaphor for a woman's fraught relationship with her body and mind, Julia Fine once again delivers an imaginative and "barely restrained, careful musing on female desire, loneliness, and hereditary inheritances" (Washington Post). Julia Fine is the author of What Should Be Wild, which was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Superior First Novel Award and the Chicago Review of Books Award. She teaches writing in Chicago, where she lives with her husband and children.
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Published 2021-02-23 by HarperCollins

Comments

The Upstairs House is a haunting that truly haunts. Julia Fine's writing is sharp, dark, and delightfully twisty. A totally absorbing, fiercely feminist read that keenly dissects not just a psychological break, but the identities of and impossibilities for the women at its heart. This is a book that lingers.

A little bit Shirley Jackson, Samantha Hunt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but also completely itself, The Upstairs House manages to turn the banal terrors of early motherhood, of womanhood, and daughterhood, and the ghosts that inevitably accompany them all, into a riveting page turner about trying to love in spite of the traumas that loving has wrought in the past.

The Upstairs House is a terrifying jolt of a book. Here are all the openings-up of motherhood, and all the strains of its competing demands, taken brilliantly to their richest, most frightening extremes. I was riveted by every twist and turn of this story about the hauntedness of having a child.

Fine keeps the high concept under control as the book hurtles toward a disturbing conclusion. This white-knuckle depiction of the essential scariness of new motherhood will captivate readers. Read more...

Interview: Julia Fine on Modernism, Motherhood, & Margaret Wise Brown Read more...

I've never read anything quite like The Upstairs House. Julia Fine presents a fearless portrait of maternal ambivalence, of love inextricable from resentment and trauma. Even more than the restless spirits, Megan is haunted by the identity she never has the chance to form before motherhood abruptly threatens to consume it. At once delicate and visceral, strange and deeply humane, The Upstairs House crafts a ghost story unlike any other.

In this inventive, visceral novel, Fine creates a dark fairy tale about a woman whose career plans are sidelined by pregnancy and the birth of her daughter... Within this enveloping story of harrowing hallucinations, Fine depicts the devastation of postpartum depression, all too often shrouded in shame and blame, and offers hope.

Meet the Author video Read more...

THE UPSTAIRS HOUSE was named a Most Anticipated book of 2021 by Buzzfeed, The Millions, BookClubChat, Tor, The News Minute, Books in the Freezer, Read By Dusk, Bibliolifestyle.

The Upstairs House is an inventive, surreal, feminist examination of the postpartum experience. ... The Upstairs House reveals the isolating, world-changing, full-bodied experience that is new motherhood while unfurling a fascinating tale about one of our most beloved children's book authors. I love Julia Fine's brain and the radical stories she creates. Full of rage and resentment and deep love, The Upstairs House is a must-read.

Macabre and funny, spooky and soulful, Julia Fine's The Upstairs House lets the reader inhabit a massively entertaining and slyly enlightening story nestled inside another story like a ghost within its host. Love and resentment, madness and clarity compete and comingle in this unforgettable tale of literature and legacy.