Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

by Linda Murphy Marshall

Overview

After both her parents die, Linda Murphy Marshall, a multi-linguist and professional translator, returns to her midwestern childhood home, Ivy Lodge, to sort through a lifetime of belongings with her siblings. Room by room, she sifts through the objects in her parents’ house and uses her skills and perspective as a longtime professional translator to make sense of the events of her past—to “translate” her memories and her life. In the process, she sees things with new eyes. All of her parents’ things, everything having to do with their cherished hobbies, are housed in a home that, although it looks impressive from the outside, is anything but impressive inside; in short, she now realizes that much of it —even the house’s fancy name—was show.

By the time Murphy Marshall is done with Ivy Lodge, she has not only made new discoveries about her past, she has also come to a new understanding of who she is and how she fits into her world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647423674
Publisher:	She Writes Press
Publication date:	07/12/2022
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	668,939
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Linda Murphy Marshall is a multi-linguist and writer with a PhD in Hispanic languages and literature, a master’s in Spanish, and an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Maryland Literary Review, the Ocotillo Review, Chestnut Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bacopa Literary Review, PopMatters, Storgy [UK], The Bark Magazine, Catamaran Literary Reader, and Critical Read. She was featured in American Writers Review, where she was an Honorable Mention for the 2019 Fiction Contest. She was long-listed in Strands Publishers’s 2021 International Flash Fiction Contest, and was a finalist in the 2020 Annual Adelaide Literary Contest for one of her essays. In addition, she is currently a reader for Fourth Genre and a translation editor for the Los Angeles Review. Her sketches and paintings have been featured in art shows and galleries. She lives in Columbia, MD.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

1 Ivy Lodge 7

2 Gill Avenue: Before the Glitter 17

3 Fountain of Youth 32

4 Animal Instincts 35

5 Stone Soldiers 38

6 Remembering the Alamo 41

7 The Siblings Arrive 44

8 Kitchen: The Heart of the Home 50

9 Breakfast Nook: Stand-In Family Room 65

10 Rathskeller: Train[ing] Ground 79

11 Basement: Working on the Railroad 89

12 First-Floor Bathroom: Unwelcome Visitors 113

13 First-Floor Bedroom: The Teenage Years 116

14 Foyer: Making an Entrance 126

15 Attic: Gone and Forgotten 139

16 My Parents' Bedroom: My Mother 147

17 My Parents' Bedroom: My Father 182

18 Second-Floor Bedroom 208

19 Dining Room: Diorama of Silver, China, and Crystal 218

20 Living Room: The Beginning of the End 241

21 A Final Translation 249

Epilogue 259

Editorial Reviews

07/25/2022

A tour of a home, a family, and a life, Marshall’s accomplished, incisive memoir takes as its organizing principle a trip through the eponymous Ivy Lodge, the somewhat regal but “funeral” Tudor that her family purchased in 1960. Linking the purchase to the white flight that reshaped greater St. Louis and other American cities, Marshall, a translator, conducts a moving survey of the home, her familial relationships, and her own understanding of who she is—and, in the process, at last “stop viewing my life through the arbitrary lexicon my parents devised.”

Marshall has made a life, as a translator, finding and explicating the truest of meanings; here, she applies those exacting skills—and her considerable acumen as a prose stylist—to what Miranda Lambert calls “the house that made me,” as well as the people in it and the “cracks in our foundation that no one could fix.” As her story moves through the tumult of the 1960s and the years beyond, with Marshall often feeling herself to be ostracized onto the fringes of the family, Ivy Lodge finds her moving through this memory-haunted home, room by room, centering chapters on the rathskeller basement, the bedrooms (“fancy, impersonal, like showrooms of a model house before it’s occupied”), and the attic that reached from the “curving wrought iron stairs ascending from the foyer.”

Her portraits of family and accounts of conflicts (occasionally explosive, often quietly simmering) prove as striking as her descriptions of her beloved dolls, her father’s toy soldiers, and Ivy Lodge’s lofty gables. Even with such highly personal material, she proves a persuasive, perceptive analyst of the “Murphy dynamic.” Despite the pain of often being made to feel, even as an adult, as if she were unwanted—her mother regards her like she’s a "rare form of beetle under a microscope”—Marshall arrives at touching moments of empathy for the family as she sorts through it all.

Takeaway: A touching reckoning with a family, a home, and one’s place in both, in elegant prose.

Great for fans of: J. Nicole Jones’s Low Country, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House.

Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A

BookLife Reviews

2023 NYC Big Book Awards Distinguished Favorite in Memoir
2023 Readers' Favorite Book Awards Honorable Mention in Non-Fiction - Memoir
2022 Best Book Awards Finalist in Nonfiction: Creative

“Thoughtfully conceived, this deeply personal, acutely observed recollection is a captivating voyage to the past. Readers who are mourning parents will particularly relate to the story. A moving, courageously frank, and sharply intuitive account about a manor filled with memories.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“This book is a masterpiece of social observation and self-scrutiny.”
—Readers’ Favorite, 5-star review

“Translation, at its essence, is the rendering of one into another. That is the guiding force behind Ivy Lodge, one woman’s return to a childhood home and the secrets within. Triggered by the deaths of elderly parents who hoarded artifacts from a lifetime of collecting, Murphy Marshall journeys deep into the labyrinth of memory, perception, and the shapeshifting forces of identity. Room by room, object by object, she examines the detritus of a troubled family past to excavate the meaning of home and restore the narrative of a self she thought she had lost. A beautiful debut.”
—Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, author of Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams

“Ivy Lodge pulses with the elemental dynamic of family dysfunction and interpersonal isolation. Linda Murphy Marshall’s exploration of the ostentatious house in which she grew up peels back the psychic, cultural, and spiritual layers of one family’s particular, and divided, residence upon this earth. Our tribal blood both binds us and pits us against each other. Ivy Lodge brings that emotional paradox into a brilliantly sharp focus.”
—Sue William Silverman, author of How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences

“Using translation of languages as a metaphor to search for the meaning of family relationships, Linda Murphy Marshall takes the readers on a journey of recollection and compassion to understand her parents. Ultimately, Ivy Lodge is a story of self-discovery through the language of love, written in elegant prose. It is an extraordinary book.”
—Allison Hong Merrill, author of Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops: A Memoir

“With carefully crafted narrative, Linda Murphy-Marshall has written the next great memoir about her painful and still-mysterious childhood. After both parents’ deaths, she returns to the family home, Ivy Lodge—a grand façade that shrouds the emptiness inside. She moves from room to room, examining distressing memories that stem from her emotionally detached parents. A multi-linguist, Murphy-Marshall applies her considerable language skills to translate the dialogue that still echoes, ultimately accepting that some languages may be too intricate to understand. I highly recommend this first-time author and look forward to her next release!”
—Donna Koros Stramella, author of Coffee Killed My Mother

“A comfortably white middle-class American family living in the Midwest: what could go wrong? No poverty or alcoholism, no racial discrimination or physical abuse: how could someone raised in such favorable circumstances emerge so wounded? Linda Marshall’s memoir takes us deep into the dysfunction of one such family. In intriguing detail, she examines how seemingly ideal conditions can result in a lifelong attempt to ‘translate’ parents’ actions into meaning. Many will relate to the lives it describes, prevalent and arguably influential in shaping our country’s social fabric as they are.”
—Chivvis Moore, author of First Tie Your Camel, Then Trust in God: An American Feminist in the Arab World

“Ivy Lodge is a brave, beautiful book about the unspoken language of family. Linda Murphy Marshall is unafraid of looking in the dark corners of her childhood home in order to find meaning, peace, and ultimately, light.”
—Dawn Raffel, author of The Secret Life of Objects

From the Publisher

04/23/2022

After the death of her elderly parents, multi-linguist/writer Marshall (translation editor for the Los Angeles Review) and her siblings return to clean out Ivy Lodge, the Tudor-style former manor home where she spent her childhood in Kirkwood, Missouri. Room by room, Marshall conjures up memories from her childhood. For example, the foyer is where her mother received news that her brother Sam was shot in Vietnam. Marshall describes the experience of cleaning out the home with her siblings and divvying up possessions. She stands her ground over keeping her father's brush because it reminds her of brushing her mother's hair when she was in the hospital. Marshall's memories are personal, vivid, and often painful. Her parents were stoic—she only saw her mother cry once—and she holds onto hope that she will uncover something that explains her mother's icy demeanor. By walking readers through the childhood home she calls a "house divided," Marshall explores the strained relationship she had with her late parents and the distance between herself and her siblings. VERDICT Marshall's reflections on coming of age during the 1960s will appeal to some readers, as will her experience being raised by cold and distant parents.—Erin Shea Dummeyer

Library Journal

★ 2022-03-17
Following the deaths of her parents, a translator returned to her family home to sort through their possessions in this debut memoir.

In 1959, when Marshall was 9 years old, she and her siblings were taken by their parents to visit Ivy Lodge. Erected in the 1860s and rebuilt in 1939, this Tudor-style manor in Kirkwood, Missouri, would soon become their home. Forty years later, the author, a translator working in over a dozen languages, was tasked with returning to the house to sift through its contents prior to its sale. Marshall’s parents did not believe in throwing things out, and she found herself confronted by a “mausoleum of memories.” Many of the objects reminded her of the difficult relationship she had with her parents. She discovered a peanut jar used by her mother to shame the children about the number of calories they consumed. The brass knuckles owned by her father, who worked for the FBI during World War II, left her with a sense of foreboding about his unknown past. Employing her skills as a translator, Marshall started to reinterpret the objects to glean a deeper understanding of herself and her family. The author’s imaginative, elegant prose beguiles from the outset: “The home had been dropped on top of our…personal Rubik’s puzzle—our family—shattering it in the process.” Marshall takes a curatorial approach, examining many objects in detail and then allowing their histories to unfold. Regarding an unfinished piece of embroidery, the author writes: “Loose, unknotted threads extend off the top of the piece—perhaps intended to be a bookmark—as though it had been left behind when its owner departed in a hurry.” Marshall has a great eye for fine details, and even seemingly insignificant items are loaded with meanings that are waiting to be unlocked. Some readers may misconceive the premise of the memoir as cloyingly sentimental. The author sidesteps this pitfall with her often brutal honesty: “I’m…searching this home for anything that is evidence of my parents’ love for me.” Thoughtfully conceived, this deeply personal, acutely observed recollection is a captivating voyage to the past. Readers who are mourning parents will particularly relate to the story.

A moving, courageously frank, and sharply intuitive account about a manor filled with memories.

Kirkus Reviews