Leaving the Pink House by Ladette Randolph (review)

Remember those first days after 9/11—when each decision, no matter how profound or mundane, seemed laden with import beyond any reasonable measure? It was a period of upheaval and pain when everyone seemed either paralyzed or rushing toward action—any action—and no one really knew which was the right response.

Ladette Randoph’s memoir Leaving the Pink House is the story of one woman’s path through a complicated life during complicated times and it begins in the moment before the moment. Randolph does not linger on sensation nor tragedy. Instead she evokes with heartbreaking vividness memories of her own life in such a way that the memories of a shared cultural past spring back to life on the page.

The memoir opens in early September 2001 as the author and her husband are considering the purchase of a run-down farmhouse on the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska. It was one of dozens of such houses the two had looked at over the previous months and it was an exercise that Randolph admitted she performed “begrudgingly” with no real intention to follow through. It was her husband’s dream to move to the country, not hers. The simple life she and her husband had created in the pink house they presently shared was exactly the life “a devotee of the quotidian,” as Randoph identified herself, would choose.

Perhaps looking at houses would have remained a kind of pastime, but for reasons Randolph admitted she didn’t understand, this time things had gone so far as to bring in realtors to discuss this particular house. Even then she wasn’t sure she could go through with giving up the life they’d built.

Then came September 11, and “everything changed.” Suddenly in tandem with all the fears about the state of the economy, where buying a house that needed a complete remodel seemed risky and frivolous, came “strange, survivalist thoughts” about having their own well and land to grow food to live on. In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center, “thinking logically was perhaps not anyone’s first concern.” And so began an eleven-month-long, intensive remodeling project on a house the author said again and again was nowhere she could imagine living.

“We had enough experience from previous renovation projects in the pink house to have developed a formula: triple the initial cost estimate and double the time estimate.” If that formula held true, Randolph mused, they’d be short on both time and money, but unexplainable forces both within and without meant they had “no choice but to keep going and to trust our luck.” The book is a record of a remodeling project that serves as a metaphor for life. That could be said to be true of all remodeling projects, I suppose, but in Randolph’s capable hands the surface story of the kind of project that can strain even the most stable of marriages becomes a solid framework for meditations on the author’s life.

“I best understand my life through the houses where I’ve lived. I have only to remember a particular house to summon clear memories of a given time and place. . . . Houses are often the archives for my deepest, most resonant memories, the places where I’ve curated my life stories.”

Structured as a month-by-month chronology of the remodeling project, the memoir intersperses each month with an essay about a time and place from Randolph’s past. Each essay is a deeply personal study of where she came from and how she came to be the person she is

In the first essay, Randolph offers a succinct history of Nebraska that moves smoothly into the story of her ancestors and the awakening of a conscious mind. “This is when I first know there is a me, watching, separate, and yet a part of this place, these people.” In subsequent essays Randolph presents the world as seen through...