The House on the Hill: A Memoir

Susan Duncan has reached an age where there’s no point in sweating long-term ramifications. There aren’t any. This new understanding offers the emotional freedom and moral clarity to admit to hidden facts of aging and, ultimately, to find ways to embrace them. This, in turn, unleashes an overwhelming desire to confront her intractable 95-year-old mother with the dreadful secrets of the past before it is too late. Interwoven with stories from the land—building a sustainable eco-house in New South Wales with her engineer husband, and grappling with white-eyed roans, dogs, droughts, and flooding rains, not to mention blunt-speaking locals—this is a book about a mother and daughter coming to terms, however uneasy, with the awful forces that shaped their relationship. Susan Duncan writes with honesty about discovery and forgiveness, and what it takes to rework shrinking boundaries into a new and rich life.