Sarah Matalone

Lee Matalone (Col ’11) will publish Home Making, her first novel, in February 2020. The novel is about the intersection of three people as they come to grips with identity, family legacy, and what it means to make a house a true home. Matalone writes about death and loss for The Rumpus. She lives in South Carolina, where she is a lecturer at Clemson University.

Cybil is a war child—the result of a brief affair between a young Japanese woman and a French
soldier—who at a young age is transplanted to Tucson, Arizona, and raised by an American
officer and his rigid wife. An outsider in a white neighborhood, Cybil rebels in adolescence and
grows up to become a successful ob-gyn.

Chloe, Cybil’s daughter, is adrift in an empty house in the hills of Virginia. Her marriage has
fallen apart, and her estranged husband is dying of cancer. Room by room, Chloe makes her new
house into a home, grappling with the stories she has inherited from her mother and eventually
uncovering a deep betrayal.

Beau, Chloe’s closest friend, remains in love with a man he knew from his youth in Lake
Charles, Louisiana. Shepherding Chloe through her grief, he is often called back to his loud,
humid, chaotic childhood in Southwest Louisiana, where he first reckoned with the intricate ties
between queerness, loneliness, and place.