It goes without saying, Stacked Up knows the allure of visiting the domestic spaces of living authors. But a dead writer’s house? Why would anyone set foot in one of the 73 writers’ house museums across the country?
Anne Trubek answers this question in her witty book, A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses. One day last winter, she joined us in a little experiment. Anne reached out to Dave Cullen, author of Columbine, to see if he was game for playing possum. We charged Anne with the task of evaluating Dave’s place to see if it could stack up against writers’ house museums across the country.
A self-proclaimed skeptic, Anne finds it hard to make the connection between a dark, musty set of rooms and the vivid prose of our most revered authors. As she points out, if you love Huck Finn, you’re not gonna find Huck there in Mark Twain’s kitchen. Though Anne’s eyes might remain dry while a fellow visitor’s well up in Langston Hughes’ study, she gets it. Like the authors’ works, we experience their homes in our own personal way. And a physical visit to these places, like the act of reading, allows us to make our own internal connections.
New York City is arguably the country’s literary capital but the cost of real estate is prohibitive for writers’ house museums. Dave, who’s fairly new to the city, was living in a sublet. Anne faced a big challenge indeed in curating his scant belongings into a top-notch museum.
At first glance, Anne didn’t find much in Dave’s apartment to put on display. Still, she riffed brilliantly on his vitamins and bran cereal. Her tone shifted in Dave’s office when her eyes fell on the journals of the Columbine killers. She had a physical reaction and had to steady herself in front of what she described as “powerful paper.”
Coincidentally, the Stacked Up interview happened a few days after the shooting of US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Later that afternoon, Dave would be making a television appearance on a news program to discuss the tragedy. He was in demand as an expert who could make sense of the motives of the young gunman from Tuscon and talk about what he learned from Columbine survivors about their healing process.
At the end of her tour, Anne expressed hope that some day in the future, Dave will stand out as one of the writers who helped contextualize the violent events very much present in our lives at this time in history. She declared his home not quite a museum, but a sublet with potential.
In which the author explains how books about real life are better than fiction.
First editions from her grandmother feature prominently in Jennifer Gilmore’s library.
