April 5, 2009 • reading •

Sunday Book Talk: “Home Girl,” by Judith Matloff

Thanks to Julie Harabedian at FSB Associates for making this book available for review (months ago – sorry it’s taken me so long to get to it)!

Home Girl: Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block by Judith Matloff

Home Girl: Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block
Judith Matloff
Random House, 2008 (hardcover) (ISBN 1400065267 / 9781400065264)
Nonfiction/memoir, 304 pages

First sentence: I needed to get a second look. After all, I had just pledged our entire savings on a house in Harlem, without informing my husband, who was in Moscow, 5,620 miles away.

Book description: After twenty years as a foreign correspondent in tumultuous locales including Rwanda, Chechnya, and Sudan, Judith Matloff is ready to put down roots and start a family. She leaves Moscow and returns to her native New York City to house-hunt for the perfect spot while her Dutch husband, John, stays behind in Russia with their dog to pack up their belongings. Intoxicated by West Harlem’s cultural diversity and, more important, its affordability, Judith impulsively buys a stately fixer-upper brownstone in the neighborhood.

Little does she know what’s in store. Judith and John discover that their dream house was once a crack den and that “fixer upper” is an understatement. The building is a total wreck: The beams have been chewed to dust by termites, the staircase is separating from the wall, and the windows are smashed thanks to a recent break-in. Plus, the house–crowded with throngs of brazen drug dealers–forms the bustling epicenter of the cocaine trade in the Northeast, and heavily armed police regularly appear outside their door in pursuit of the thugs and crackheads who loiter there.

Thus begins Judith and John’s odyssey to win over the neighbors, including Salami, the menacing addict who threatens to take over their house; MacKenzie, the literary homeless man who quotes Latin over morning coffee; Mrs. LaDuke, the salty octogenarian and neighborhood watchdog; and Miguel, the smooth lieutenant of the local drug crew, with whom the couple must negotiate safe passage. It’s a far cry from utopia, but it’s a start, and they do all they can to carve out a comfortable life. And by the time they experience the birth of a son, Judith and John have even come to appreciate the neighborhood’s rough charms.

Comments: Home ownership can be an adventure, but not always as big an adventure as it was for Judith and John. Buying a “fixer-upper” is one thing. Buying a fixer-upper on a street where you’re surrounded by abandoned and run-down buildings, and where your neighbors are drug dealers and their clients, is something else again. But after living and working abroad as a journalist for twenty years, during which time she bought her first house (in South Africa), married, and had two miscarriages, Judith was ready to return to her native land – New York City. Thanks to differentials in foreign income and costs of living and her mother’s wise money management, she was pleased to find out she had a healthy nest egg to use in buying a house – but it’s New York City, where a quarter of a million dollars doesn’t go very far. At the suggestions of her sister and brother-in-law, who had bought a home in a dicey part of Brooklyn, and a friend who owned a former crack house, Judith explored some of the outer reaches of the city – areas full of old buildings with potential – and wound up with a West Harlem brownstone that had “good bones” but needed a lot of work.

Judith and John were “pioneers” in an “emerging” neighborhood, which basically means they bought in prior to gentrification, when there was no telling whether the area would improve or deteriorate. Some of their neighbors were long-established Harlemites who continued to defend their territory, but the block was a stronghold of the Dominican-immigrant drug trade, and Judith eventually comes to a shaky truce with the leader of the crew. It’s not just the dealers, though – there are also addicts for whom the block is “home,” including the crackhead squatting in the abandoned house next door but who makes daily claims and threats on Judith’s new home.

Judith, John, and the house all survive the stress of a full renovation and the selection of tenants (just because they could manage to buy a New York brownstone didn’t mean they could afford to live in it on their own, so the renovation created three apartments) just in time for the arrival of their first child. While Judith has been torn between appreciation for the diversity of the neighborhood and concerns about personal safety, becoming a parent pushes her toward more community activism. Eventually, those efforts help to banish the drug dealers and usher in the block’s official “gentrification” phase. Still living in West Harlem today among neighbors of all ages, professions, and ethnicities, Judith has realized that home – and family – are where you make them.

As a born New Yorker (though not raised there), I frequently feel a pull toward New York stories, and this one fascinated me. Since I currently live in another insane real-estate market, I understand why people buy downtrodden properties in the hopes of improving both the house and the community, but I don’t think I’d ever be that adventurous myself. (Much as I hate admitting it, I’ve become a suburbanite at heart in quite a few respects.) This was another journalist’s memoir that balanced the personal story with its context very well, and I liked Matloff’s writing – she really pulled me in, and I was interested in getting to know her and the characters who surrounded her. I found Home Girl to be a compelling story of taking chances that, for the most part, actually worked out, and I’m just sorry it took me so long to pull it out of the TBR-for-review stack.

Rating: 4/5

Buy the book:

Other bloggers’ reviews:
B&B ex libris
Booking Mama
The Printed Page
Leafing Through Life
A Novel Menagerie
S. Krishna’s Books
Planet Books
Citizen Reader
Linus’s Blanket 

If you have reviewed this book, please leave your link in the comments or e-mail it to me at 3.rsblog AT Gmail DOT com, and I’ll edit this review post to include it!

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8 comments

  1. this is one that I passed on when it was being shopped around; I’m glad you enjoyed it and I liked reading your review and sharing it vicariously! 🙂

  2. The description of the house they bought sounds a little familiar. 🙂 I don’t think my house was originally a crack den, but I do wonder about the people who lived here before us. For months after, we’d get some interesting characters at our door. Not to mention the stuff we found in the backyard. I wish I knew then what I know now about house shopping. It looked pretty decent on the surface, but it really was a mess–still is to some degree. Anyhow, this isn’t about me. Back to your book review!

    This does sound like a great book. I think I could relate to it to some extent, even having never been to New York. Wonderful review, Florinda!

  4. Marie – Glad you enjoyed the review! We can’t accept all of the offers, of course, so sometimes we do end up reading vicariously.

    Wendy (Literary Feline) – House shopping is an enormous challenge, and sometimes you get less than what you paid for – or things you never realized you were paying for in the first place. In any case, you might enjoy this book.

    Nicole – Thanks; I’ve edited the review to add your link. You have a good point about Judith’s naivete (or denial, perhaps?), but maybe with less of it, she’d never have bought that house in that neighborhood in the first place.

  6. Beth K. – I first heard about it from someone else’s review and put it on my wish list, so when I was offered a copy, I snapped it up :-). Just one of the things I love about book blogging!