A compelling and inventive memoir exploring how pain and pleasure are passed down through generations of women
For years, Lauren W. Westerfield looked back at her childhood as an imaginative playscape lovingly crafted by her artist mother. But in truth, theirs was always a fraught relationship, close yet turbulent. It wouldn’t be until her mid-twenties that Westerfield would learn that her mother was assaulted while living as a single woman in 1970s Los Angeles, or until her mid-thirties when caretaking for her now chronically ill mother during pandemic lockdown would reveal how that earlier incident and its ripple effects had shaped both their lives.
The essays and assemblages in this book plumb the depths of two women’s experiences, exploring the pain and pleasure they find in their bodies, in culture, and in their own art. Violence, beauty, and love reverberate and dissipate and shape the forms and psyches of these two profoundly connected family members. At once raw and refined, narrative and lyrical, nostalgic and blunt, the stories and images presented here explore Westerfield’s life—from childhood to adulthood—passing through innocence, self-discovery and familial tethers. In unpacking her mother’s history and the complexities of their relationship, Westerfield finds herself confronted with her own story: one grounded in a yearning for agency and individuation, of a body and mind groomed to be at odds with one another, of a feminist politics examining deeply rooted patriarchal understandings of beauty, control, and power.
Part memoir, part critical sense-making, part reckoning with family, identity, illness, addiction, art, and inheritance, Woman House draws on diverse inspirations in an attempt to recontextualize the female body—in danger, in pleasure, in portraiture, in proximity, in resistance—and challenge the structures that silence and restrict female expression.
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Publication date: March 3, 2026
Advance Praise for Woman House
“Fiercely written, full of urgency and daring, Woman House tears at the structures and constrictions passed down from one generation to the next. Each rupture of memory is a painful exposure, the telling and untelling and retelling a balm to the mother wound. Part treatise, part confession, part interrogation, all of it tinted with anger, love, curiosity, and compassion, Woman House is a meditation on the desire for desire — a love song to the unsated self.”
“This is a book interested in going in, inside in order to look out; asking questions about how our selves are shaped and formed; about aging, body, sex (sex as sex and gender, and sex as sexuality) and power, violence and its aftermath. It is interested in the fraughtness of mother-daughter relationships; in shifting familial dynamics, in what happens to our self-knowledge when we understand new things about our family history; in the traumas that are passed down to us, and what sense we make of them—when we know of them and when we don’t. Along the way, Westerfield explores Louise Bourgeois’s art, old Hollywood films, the writing of Beat poet Joanne Kyger, and Jane Austen’s novels, as well as medical research and the language of visual arts to explore spirals, repetition, personal habits, family patterns. Woven through with poetic sections called Interludes, this is a project that asks what new knowledge arises when one uses the lens of feminist politics to investigate those spaces in a life that have been shelled off, opening somatically and emotionally to the possibility of new truths. Westerfield deftly twists these many threads into her own kind of spirals, then untangles, until this sharp, complex, layered read becomes a reckoning, an unfurling.””
“At once intimate, surgical, elliptical, and probing, these essays explore womanhood and daughterhood through the lens of art, pleasure, and trauma. Westerfield finds meaning in the smallest acts and rituals, trying to make sense of what it means to live authentically in and with the body. A feverish, glowing book.”
“Lauren Westerfield’s Woman House is a beautiful study of environment and how it is a living, breathing entity just as much as the people who move within it. Through her hauntingly elegant writing, Woman House walks us through the environments of the heart, of the self and body, and of the family. This all converges into a moving story of the relationships with not only ourselves but also with those we hold most closely to our hearts. Westerfield’s essays notice the shifts in life both subtle and obvious and invite us into the discoveries, too. She leaves each of us a little bit changed, a bit more reflective, and a lot more connected to the world.”
“This is a book about love and transformation. A memoir of loving and caring for a mother with whom she has an enduring but complex relationship, Woman House chronicles how a young woman learns to write her own story instead of accepting the cookie cutter narratives this society is so quick to force the minds and bodies of women into. A beautifully written account of coming to know and accept oneself, Woman House is a book that invites readers to greet the world and themselves with tenderness and care.”
“Rendered in gorgeous language, Woman House traces the sometimes-fraught relationship between the narrator and her mother, amplified by the pandemic. Each of these essays reveal what it means to live inside a woman’s body, through illness and aging and sexual violence. A collection that is both deeply thoughtful and deeply personal, Woman House imagines a way forward, even when our bodies and our memories fail.”