In this engaging chronology spanning twenty years, from college to hard-won success, the award-winning playwright tells her story of searching for home. The once-aspiring performing artist explores the world through vastly different New York neighborhoods, a series of part-time jobs, an enviable stint at Julliard, and slowly increasing acclamation. She recognizes an undeniable wish in herself to separate from her mother, a wish complicated by the bonds of shared history and an illness in later life. Even after surviving being raped in her early twenties, and insisting on independence, Berman is consumed for years in a yo-yo like love affair. Her writing moves fluidly as she schleps from studio to loft to the occasional luxury apartment, while angst, always present, only occasionally becomes annoying.
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Elle.com Top 10 Summer Read
LAMag.com Reading List Pick“Brooke Berman is the Real Deal: a miraculous, soul-seeking, honest artist who tells her story with humor, insight and a deep and abiding respect for this journey we call life.
No Place Like Home is a gift to artists and dreamers everywhere who yearn to find their place in the daunting world of art, commerce, and real estate.”
—Rebecca Walker, author of
Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence, and
Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self
“Brooke Berman's voice is utterly distinct, and her book, detailing her nomadic artist's journey toward both a successful playwriting career and a home of her own, through 20 years of cramped sublets, high-rise palaces, writer's colonies, and boyfriend's vans, is a hilarious, hopeful, and penetrating must-read.”
—Maria Dahvana Headley, author of
The Year of Yes
“Forget the yellow bricks, this road is paved with cheap futons and pull-out couches. In her pursuit of love, art, and a place to call her own, Brooke Berman goes on a journey that’s as harrowing as it is hilarious. Written with candor, honesty and a delicious self-deprecating wit,
No Place Like Home proves to be an irresistible read.”
— David Lindsay Abaire, author of
Rabbit Hole
“Compelling, original, and a fascinating portrait of life among young artists in New York City,
No Place Like Home will resonate with readers who are searching to discover their own true “home.” That is, practically all of us
.”—Gretchen Rubin, author of
The Happiness Project
“Brooke's journey in this book is both terrifying and beautiful. On her way to becoming an artist she loses her jobs, her lovers, her apartments, her belongings, and her Mother, but never her mind, and never her writer's soul. Reading every page, I could hear her laugh at what her life threw at her. Brooke is a brave, warrior woman in damned scary days, and I loved this careful accounting of her search for a safe place to lay her head.”
—Marsha Norman, Pultizer Prize-winning playwright and co-director of the Playwrights Program at Julliard
