On Interiors

A wide ranging, intensely personal essay covering everything from open plan architecture and nineteenth=century decor crazes to invisible illness, childhood hardship, and the "original home" of the female body, On Interiors is an alternately swashbuckling and deeply felt ode to the places we call home. In something like a controlled careen, Silcoff coasts from the "obscene drama" of her own "always dying" body to the blandness of Millennial design, from the joy of post-divorce middle aged sex, to the "orgasmic maximalism" rising through pandemic-era shelter magazines, from menopause to antiques, fragile masculinity to "stupidly enormous steel appliances in kitchens." "I am a woman," she begins, "with a confining body who has been confined to a home more than I have been any other thing. In my life, I have been home as much as I have been woman. I see myself as a kind of feminine expert in cloisterment."