REVIEW: Sixteen Homes by Catherine Owen

Reviewed by Vicky Mayk

Early in her memoir Sixteen Homes (Wolsak and Wynn; Oct. 2026), Canadian Catherine Owen writes that she plans to do a “house-reading.” Eschewing the idea of memoir for its own sake, she tells readers she will examine her life against the backdrop of the sixteen homes where she has lived while at the same time considering the social issues that emerge related to housing. At a time when soaring mortgage rates and a lack of affordable housing are a concern for many, it’s a timely approach.

Within this framework, Owen offers readers a memoir that is both highly personal and at the same time universal. Houses as repositories of memory and keys to our past are the book’s uniting themes. In her opening chapter, quoting French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, she writes, “the house is the ‘topography of our intimate being’ and we cannot comprehend where we are now unless we attempt to trace where we were then.” Examining each place she has lived allows her to focus on feelings of belonging – or their lack.

The memoir is organized into chapters – one for each of the sixteen homes in the title, plus additional chapters for interviews with her parents about their early memories of home, family history, and memories of friends’ houses. She also employs sections titled “Interludes,” which allow her to explore other iterations of home. Several interludes explore the homes of famous writers she has visited, such as Hemingway, Beatrix Potter, and Anne Frank. Another examines what she calls “travel houses,” the places we stay that become temporary homes.

Readers should not come to Owen’s book expecting a typical narrative. These are stories told in words, floor plans, journal entries, and pictures. Owen convinces her father to re-create simple floor plans of her past houses and each of the sixteen house chapters includes a floor plan and photos of the domicile. Other chapters and interludes are highlighted by photos of people and places. In addition, Owen – a published poet – includes poems that complement the book’s themes. The result is a book that at times feels like a scrapbook.

Owen succeeds in highlighting social issues related to housing while telling her own story. The way she accomplishes this is especially noteworthy in the chapter, “The Maywood Home for Unwed Mothers.” Pregnant and unmarried at 16, Owen moves to a home for unwed mothers in the fourth month of pregnancy. Her memories and observations of the home include the realization that the atmosphere, furnishings, and the location reflected societal attitudes about the pregnant young women living there. “Architecture influences behavior,” Owen writes. “And when it comes to groups marginalized by society: the poor, the rule breakers, certain races and genders, what David Sibley calls “a geography of exclusion” abides.” Later contemplating her treatment as a pregnant teen, she adds, “We were even more painfully aware that society held no hope nor home of acceptance for us in this condition.”

Another issue related to gender – domestic violence – is highlighted in several chapters. Owen, forced to leave abusive relationships, ponders how frequently housing insecurity forces women to remain in such situations. She writes about this most eloquently in the chapter about “Delilah,” her name for the 1905-era house she purchased in Edmonton. “Delilah is magic to me because she is mine, and I don’t have to fear in the same way being ousted from her sanctuary by a breakup,” Owens writes, noting the freedom and stability that home ownership has given her. That she had to wait until she was in her 40s to be able to afford to buy a house reflects the economic challenges associated with home ownership. She also writes that she had to move from her native Vancouver – something that she swore she would never do again – to find more affordable housing in Edmonton.

One of my favorite chapters in the memoir is the one devoted to Owen’s friends Joe Rosenblatt and Faye Smith. She describes their house as her “home away from home.” The chapter will resonate with any reader who has felt like one of the family when visiting friends. Owen writes eloquently of visits to their home. Calling Joe her “Dogfather,” she refers to the couple as “my grandparents of art and nature.”

The book’s pastiche of anecdotes, journal entries, poems and photos occasionally makes for a disjointed telling of Owen’s story. But readers who can look past the memoir’s episodic quality will be glad they did. Embedded in her story are insightful comments about the nature of home in the many places she has experienced it. For example, after touring the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, Owen writes, “We were touring a physical space, yes, but we were more accurately inhabiting a home of words that Anne had left us to better understand the world through.”

I especially liked what she wrote about artists’ and writers’ need for a space in which to work. “The writer must make it so, christen the room that was likely designated otherwise, and continue to stand by its name, despite all possible oppositions, the loudest being the internal voice that queries, ‘Are you and your work worthy of this space to create in?’ ”

Owen asks again and again what constitutes home. In the end, her most honest answer might be, “I was only ever truly at home creating my art in all its forms.”