In My Father's House: Elegy for an Obsessive Love

by Miranda Seymour

'Dear Thrumpton, how I miss you tonight,' wrote George Seymour in 1944, when he was aged twenty-one. But the object of his affection was not a young woman, but a house -- ownership of which was then a distant dream. But he did eventually acquire Thrumpton, a beautiful country house in Nottinghamshire, and it was in this idyllic home that Miranda Seymour grew up. But her upbringing was far from idyllic, as life revolved around her father's capriciousness. The House took priority, and everything else was secondary, even his wife. Until, that is, the day late on in his life when George Seymour took to riding powerful motorbikes around the countryside clad in black leather in the company of a young male friend. Had he taken leave of his senses? Or finally found them? And how did this sea-change affect his wife and daughter?

Both biography and family memoir, IN MY FATHER'S HOUSEis a riveting and ultimately shocking portrait of desire both overt and suppressed, and the devastating consequences of misplaced love.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, British Literature, History, Architecture, Biography Memoir

288 pages, Paperback

First published February 5, 2007

Reviews

[Racquel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Having read some good reviews, I was disappointed by this book. I think the majority of people probably carry around a suitcase filled with carefully-preserved childhood grievances which are periodically unfolded and held up for review, but they aren’t the stuff of great reading for the rest of us. The result of this author’s catharsis is neither interesting nor enlightening; her self-indulgence made all the more uncomfortable by the obvious distress of a mother who has attempted to maintain some semblance of dignity and privacy throughout, what has clearly been, a challenging marriage.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book about a father’s love for an old English manor. His love started even before WWII, that destroyed so many old family homes. The father loved the aristocratic life, even though his ties to it were tenuous. He forced his family, wife, son, and daughter to follow every “protocol” of his beliefs of how landed aristocracy should behave and dress. These actions turned the daughter against him and made his wife become a mouse.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This moving book is unlike anything I've ever read.

The author writes of her family's English manor home and it's presence in the life her family. The focus is on her father's obsessive love of the house and how this devotion effects his relationship with his family.

I found the early parts of the book, which describe her parents' aristocratic families and their bizarre interactions fascinating, but I was also taken later when the attention narrowed to her immediate family. Often, when books shift like this, one side or the other get sort shrift, or the shift is awkwardly abrupt. Seymour skilfully weaves all of these threads quite successfully.

As much as this book is about her father's relationship to his home, it's also about the the author' relationship with her father, and, more subtly, her relationship with her mother. Little conversations he has with her mother are sprinkled into the narrative at pertinent points, as if her mother were reading over her shoulder as she wrote, correcting, confirming or arguing about how events unfolded. I found her mother to be the most intriguing person in the book.

The family's story takes an odd turn as her father goes into extreme midlife crisis mode and begins riding motorcycles around the countryside at all hours of the night with younger men that he takes in as friends. The denial on the part of all the family members, and the pressures and conflicts this causes, made me squirm as I read them. I don't want to say too much about this, but a funeral scene near the end of the book left me stunned in a weird place between weeping and laughing hysterically.

Another aspect of the book that brought me in was the author's access to her father's diaries, which he kept off and on throughout his life. What a gift (or a curse?) to be able to compare your memories of events in your life with the version written down at the time by a parent with whom you had a love/hate relationship.

[MargCal · Rating 4 out of 5]

bookshelves: autobiography, biography, architecture, england, family-relationships, history, memoir, non-fiction


Finished reading: “In My Father's House: elegy for an obsessive love” by Miranda Seymour – 22.03.2015
ISBN 0743268679
ISBN13 9780743268677


Part history, part family saga, this book is about a man's obsessive love for Thrumpton Hall, an English country house near Nottingham. Miranda Seymour's father, George Seymour (rhymes with Lima!), spent much of his childhood at Thrumpton, the home of his aunt and uncle.
He loved the place so, not being entitled to inherit, took a great financial risk to buy it when in his early twenties. Having won this great prize, Seymour devoted his life to it, yet never seemed happy. A rather strange man in fact, not an easy husband or father. But it was a fascinating read, with the added bonus of the description of his wife's childhood at Chirk Castle, near Wrexham.

The interest for me was that I had visited Thrumpton, although not the inside of the House.
I did visit Chirk, seeing both inside and out, loving its stark but stunning beauty.

There's probably not a large audience for this book but anyone interested in English country houses will enjoy it very much.


Borrowed copy from the library.

[BookAddict · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't dislike this, I just didn't like it much. It seemed unfinished at the end. I don't know -- it started out pretty interesting and then about half way through either something happened to me or the story but I had a hard time getting through to the end.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This story about a man obsessed with a house is very sad. Written by his daughter who he treated terribly it's a sad commentary about someone who wasted his life devoted to an estate.

[Nightwitch · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author was definitely working out some major daddy issues with this book, but to her credit, she knows it, and she comes down fairly hard on herself on all the ways that this memoir is uncomfortable for her mother and for the other people she involves in her quest to understand her father. Well-written and strangely magnetic - I blitzed through this far more quickly than I thought I would - but the ending definitely felt more like an editorial necessity than an actual conclusion.

[Amy L · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was not what I expected. I generally enjoy memoirs about life in old houses, but this book deals mostly with a father’s obsession with the house he loved from childhood and the negative effect it had on his daughter, the author. Not an enjoyable read.

[Susan__B1989 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this

[Wileyoneone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read on my Kindle

[Becky C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

While suffering from Downton Abbey withdrawl I came across this book amidst general searching about country homes. It's a fascinating story filled with interesting characters, not the least of which is the House (always refered to with an upper case H). Miranda's father, George, fell in love with Thrumpton when hs was a very young child and it dominated his life and thoughts to the very end. While not in the direct line to inherit the house he does, finally, inherit it only to discover the terrible financial burden such homes often represent for their owners as well as the psychic burden of being owned by, as well as owning such a house. He is a demanding tyrant with his wife and children but undergoes a mid-life metamorphosis into a black-leather-clad biker with an inordinant attachment to young men who share his love of motorcycles. It is also the story of Miranda, her brother, her mother and their life with this mercurial, complex and difficult man.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an intriguing book - not as the title suggests a book about obsessive romantic love, but rather a father's love for a house - to the detriment of his immediate family. He sounds a thoroughly self-obsessed pain in the neck, although his daughter who has written the book seems no better. Moral of story - don't be a posh repressed male owner of a big house, you will only end up an ageing biker in leathers with a dubious fondness for young men. I wish also that Miranda Seymour had bothered to give us a few more details on how she managed to hang onto the house despite hints that they'd never be able to given the crippling inheritance tax, but she conveniently skips those practicalities and dwells more on raking up the uncomfortable childhood scenes that she still feels resentful over. Not sure her mother would be entirely happy with this reading.

[Kristie Helms · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the NYTimes Book Review: "George’s childhood was like something out of Kipling. He was awakened in the morning by the housemaid, Sarah Death, and the footman, Percy Crush, shined his shoes. His best friend was the butler, Shotbolt. Lonely and abandoned, mostly ignored by his aunt and uncle, the little boy performed a heroic act of transference: he fell in love with their house. As he got older he even wrote letters to it. “Dear Thrumpton, how I miss you tonight,” he wrote in 1944, when he was 21."

This was one of the most oddly compelling books I've read in ages. Essentially the story of a daughter's perspective on her father's love his house... it becomes a fascinating look at how we're shaped and how we shape others. Seymour provides an unflinching look at her father, but also at herself.

It's one of the most honest memoirs I think I've ever read. Well done.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of an odd book, but so was the author's father. This is the true story about a man in love with a house. Well, true escept that it is told from the daughter's perspective, even though she has input from his diaries and his wife. He was not a nice man, but his love affair with the house appears to have resulted from a fairly unhappy childhood and repressed homosexuality - both a common occurrence in the English generation of wannabee aristocrats before WWII. The love affair with the house has been passed on to his daughter. It's well-written, but snide. She didn't like her father very much, but she admits she is a lot like him. Her mother would appear to have gotten the worst of the deal over the years, but that is also from the daughter's perspective.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is all about a child, then an adult, who has spent her whole life seeking her father's approval and love. It may appear as if she has it from time to time, but his selfishness always wins. His ability to make her feel guilty or selfish for simply being herself is cruel and constricting. Her shouts of " FREE, FREE" after his funeral is completely understood by me. This isn't a book about a Manor house and its inhabitants; it is about a man who had desires, who was brave enough to fulfill his needs, but had to make others feel worthless while doing that. It is about CONTROL. He pulled everyone's strings all of the time and always got what HE wanted. There's much emotional wreckage left behind. I would have given this more than 5 stars.

[Joy Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Memoirs are always interesting because they are the truth for a certain point of view (as they say in Star Wars). I chose this book because it sounded interesting although I knew nothing at all about the author or her ancestry. It is a hard story to read because you can tell the family is a train wreck. The love of house and lack of self-worth on the part of the father leads to increasing amounts of pain for his family. Although I realize that George Seymour cannot defend himself, he surely was an odd duck. Other reviewers have expressed how unremittingly sad the whole affair is, and I must agree. I hope for the author's sake that she has been able to heal in the writing. I cannot say I enjoyed the book, but it was interesting in an unusual sort of way.

[Carrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I almost want to criticize this book for false advertising, but that would not be fair -- I should have paid more attention to the subtitle than the picture on the cover.

On the surface, it seems to be about the last gasps of a great country house in Britain, but it is actually a slightly voyeuristic portrait of the author's peculiar father and his obsession with his family's house. I wanted to read about the rooms, the corridors, the decay, the grandeur, the physicality of this marvelous structure; instead, I got a few hundred pages about a sour, unappealing snob who belittled his family on a daily basis.

It was interesting, hence the three stars, but not what I was hoping for.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

George Seymour is in love with a estate where he was raised my his aunt and uncle named Thrumpton Hall. Thrumpton is always first and foremost in his mind, and he will protect it at all costs over the whims and comforts of his friends and family. George never really has a childhood, becomes a little adult and is frightened beyonsd belief when his parents go off to Bolivia in the early 1930's. Throughout his life George is fearful and cannot be alone. His Thrumpton obsession drives him to do some unusual things. I especially enjoyed this book, since I currently live in a house that I love that seems to have a soul. Well written by his daughter, Miranda.

[Esther · Rating 2 out of 5]

This cropped up in one of Nick Hornby's reading diaries and sounded interesting - Sawyer has written a memoir of her eccentric father, who acquires a country house through distant relations which is his obsession over his neglected wife/children and then in his sixties takes to riding motorbikes, leathers and hanging around young men. So I was pleased when I found a brand new hardback in a book sale. Well its a fabulous story, what a funny life but oh dear Miranda Sawyer is not much of a writer. Really irritating at times her rambling and inserting interjections from her mother protesting at her recollections of events. I think this would have been better handled by an impartial biographer.

[Aimee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A house -- or really a manor -- is the main character of this nonfiction book. It's not quite a memoir because Seymour focuses on the impact this grand English country estate has had on her mother, father and herself (her brother is more or less absent from the book.) It's the tale of an ever-needy mansion (new roof, new heating system), a cash-poor family that inherited this house, the snobbery of the English upper-classes in the second half of the 20th century, an unhappy marriage, a closeted gay father, and a lonely childhood. Seymour's style is engaging, honest and painful.

[Tiffany · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and also a relatively quick read that gives a look into a mostly lost way of life in the UK--that of the country squire and his great house. But here were aspects of the memoir that left this middle-class American reader at a loss: How exactly does her father make money once he no longer has a job? To make money off investments, one needs to start with something to invest! An offhand mention of Lloyd's and asbestos is a major plot point that smacks of "it's common knowledge" but had me headed to google.

[Betsy · Rating 2 out of 5]

okay, I cheated and skipped several chapters in this odd memoir's midsection so I could find out just what weirdness this author's father was afflicted with. I was weary of all the beating around the bush. It's not really much of a spoiler to reveal his affliction but those who may read this book may want to stop here. For the others, the authers priggish snob of a dad had a thing for young men (although it appeared to be fairly sexless.) 0dd guy, odd book, interesting to a point...

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh - so depressing. I didn't mind Seymour's writing, but I somehow envisioned it to be more of a story about an eccentric Englishman and his house -- not the tale of a painfully dysfuctional family. (Who needs to read that? Don't we all have our own?)

Regardless, I'm itching to pay this place a visit on my next trip to jolly old England... I'm intrigued.

[Sylvia Tedesco · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has been a fascinating read on many levels. The story of a complicated man and the struggle he fights for so many years to keep Thrumpton Hall in the family is one level; the story of his strangely convoluted personality is another. I couldn't stop reading it and immediately visited my friend down the street to loan her the book so we could talk about it together.

[Jane]

I need some new "shelves", as I have a hard time assigning stars to a book like this. If it were in its own category "memoirs about one's father's house", well, it'd be 4 or 5 stars. It took me about a month, but I read it and mostly, hmm, "enjoyed" is too strong of a word, appreciated it.

[Mary Kay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seymour's memoir of her father centers - by necessity - around Thrumpton Hall, her father's obsession. It took Miranda 10 years to gather research & to come to terms with her love/hate relationship with her dad. The book also says a lot about Seymour's mother.

[Dorothy Giebel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A daughter writes about her Father and his love of the home he inherited. She feels the house fills his heart and there is no room for anyone. It is a sad account of a family, who want to be happy but the Father is cruel and selfish.

[Jonathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Have you ever been trapped by someone who is telling you all about their family and you have no interest whatsoever? Or, perhaps they are showing you photos, too??? ....and you feel doubly trapped?? Where's the "I hated this sucky book" star??

[Cindy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, Seymour is a very accomplished writer and I always enjoy reading about lives that are totally new to me. However, I just couldn't get past the incredible disfunction of this sad, sad family. A bummer of a book.

[Grillables · Rating 1 out of 5]

I expected more from this than the self-indulgent whining and dysfunctional family mining I found. Boo.