Lisa Tracy

The tiny, insistent voice of family belongings is merely background noise without the presence of the elder generation to interpret it. Lisa Tracy and her sister did not seriously begin to investigate the provenance of their family's heirlooms until after both their parents had passed away and they were preparing to auction off many of their inherited belongings. Understandably, the process was unfinished when the auction ended their custody of the artefacts in question. Inevitably, regrets ensued.

I can relate to this story, albeit with some envy because when my mother (and her mother, both enthusiastic and knowledgeable collectors of 18th century antiques) passed away, her father and sister predeceasing her, I was still in my teens. In my semi-homelessness at the time, I was able to retrieve only a few small items from the sale of effects. The mystification (What was Uncle Roy doing with a Qing dynasty civil servant's rank insignia when family stories say that he engineered in Central America?) and sadness are the same that Tracy describes. I hope that other readers will find this book early enough in their own history to appreciate it as a cautionary tale.… (mais)

(Nonfiction, Memoir)

Blurb: “About the history of certain carefully collected heirlooms and why we hold on to the things we keep and how we let go of the ones we lose.”

Lisa Tracy found herself, along with her sister Jeanne, responsible for cleaning out her deceased parents’ home, jammed full of the belongings they had gathered over a lifetime. I also had to clear out my mother’s house, full of her possessions. But there the similarities end.

Tracy’s parents collected museum quality antiques with high dollar value, and lovely family stories attached. I, sadly, couldn’t relate.

Recommended for someone whose parents are well-to-do and will be leaving a house that someone (maybe them!) will need to clear out.

3 stars… (mais)

The author of this book, Lisa Tracy, has a fascinating lineage. On both sides of her family, she descends from several generations of career military men who rubbed shoulders with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur. One of her ancestors was the first Surgeon General of the US Navy and had ships named after him. And this is a book about their furniture.

I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that Tracy would focus on her family's furniture and household goods since she's the former Home & Design editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. It's not the best place to look for what it seems like she was looking for – an understanding of the challenges faced by earlier generations of her family, the reasons behind the choices they made, how those choices shaped their lives and the lives of future generations, and how their personalities still echo in her own life.

Tracy and I are not kindred spirits, as this passage illustrates:

I'm poking around my living room, looking for something to pass the time, when my eyes finally fall upon the sandalwood keepsake box that belonged to {her grandmother} Jeanne. I open it out of boredom as much as curiosity. One more family item to process, this box that lay unexamined all these years, and which I brought back with me finally, when we packed Mother's house. In the end I took it home with me just because it was fairly small—a little bigger than a shoebox—and I was afraid it would get lost in the shuffle.

To my surprise, I find the box is packed to the lid with letters, carefully bundled and tied with string or ribbon.

She had this box for years without opening it once?! I can't imagine ever doing that. I would be more interested in the contents of the box than in the box itself. Tracy admits to launching her search through the family documents with a view to providing provenance for the furniture and collectibles she and her sister were planning to sell at auction.

Genealogical research might have given Tracy more satisfactory answers than she gathered from the stories and memories attached to the family heirlooms. As meaningful as they can be, heirlooms can only ever tell part of a family's story.… (mais)

This was a strange and disconcerting book. Tracy comes from an old American military family, and she and her sister find themselves the recipients of many lifetimes' worth of furniture after their mother dies. This book is the story of what they do with the furniture, who they are in the context of their family, and how they cope with who they are. The family, despite the author's insistence to the contrary, is solidly upper class. The Chippendale, the Hepplewhite, the Meissen seem somehow to be imbued with emotions that, in families more like mine, get expressed, acted upon and dissipate or concentrate over time. This family, by contrast, doesn't talk about what they feel, who they are. They grit their teeth and do the proper thing, time after time, ending in a morass of regrets and half-understood sadness.

It's not an easy book to read, full as it is with could have beens. But it is indeed interesting to peer in the corner of a window at this family.



… (mais)