Things in Every Room cover art

Things in Every Room

Get 30 days of Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30-day free trial. Cancel at any time.
Pre-order: Try for £0.00
More purchase options
Pre-order Now for £27.99

Pre-order Now for £27.99

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Move away, run away, wash up on a strange shore and the room is the same. It will always be the same room... The same problems in a new arrangement.

Funny, sorrowful and filled with love and life, this beautiful and beguiling memoir goes in search of 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 abject 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, whose own gift for narrative is a complicated inheritance. Her father’s office, his briefcase, and his desk – all untouched since his death – loom beneath the leaking roof. At last, she begins to open the drawers…

© Helen Longstreth 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

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

Critic reviews

An revelatory true story about love in many 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)
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 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)
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)
No reviews yet