One Hundred Open Houses (A novel of a woman on the edge)
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One Hundred Open Houses (A novel of a woman on the edge)
Praise for Consuelo Saah Baehr:
"Nothing To Lose is fun to read. Pert, pithy and very New York. Full of the admirable offhand observations of an unfooled eye." Jill Neville, The London Times Literary Supplement
"(Daughters is) engrossing . . . the story Baehr tells touches so deeply one is tempted to reread every page." - Chicago Tribune
(Best Friends is) a pleasure to read . . . fascinating, extraordinary women…I wished they were my best friends.†Susan Isaacs, author of Compromising Positions, Shining Through
“Consuelo Saah Baehr is a very talented writer. She keeps you turning the pages, heart thumping, to see what will happen next.†Rona Jaffe, author of The Best of Everything, Class Reunion
Product Description
100 Open Houses is about real estate and life. It’s about the whispers from the soul hole that we barely hear. Rebecca Haas, like all of us, is being tortured to death by the sameness of her life, her thoughts, her weight, the incessant self review of life choices, her indecision, her stalled writing career. Can a change of space really change her life and finally give her the authenticity she needs? Take this trip with Rebecca through all of the open houses and the lives lived in them – is one of them yours?
An excerpt from 100 Open Houses
Whispers from the soul hole
You’re going along thinking everything is okay. You’re not noticeably dying or anything and even though your hair was thinning, suddenly for no reason, it stabilizes – even begins to get thicker – and you think, huh, some new kind of ‘fresh hell’ hormones must be kicking in but I’ll take it. Still every morning, in the quiet few minutes when you swing your legs out of bed and decide to get up, this voice whispers from the old brain hole or maybe it’s the soul hole and it says: Wait! If you were in an Ingmar Bergman movie and Death came and played chess with you, Death would win because you are not really living the best life you can. All through last fall and early winter I had that thought in my pocket. Maybe it accounted for a new addiction to read real estate news. Maybe I thought a change of residence would do the trick Real estate is the new drug and it’s better than crack because it only costs the price of the Sunday paper and not even that if you read it on line. But also, you can go into any Open House and see apartments and houses where you would never be invited. You can look in the medicine cabinet and in the closets and pretty much look at any damn thing you want. Then, you can say, “No thanks.†The New York Times just put out an entire magazine devoted to real estate. It’s called Key and on the cover is a stylized picture of a key with red lines radiating from it that look like the vein and capillary system inside your body. Maybe that’s the subliminal message they are trying to send: that Real Estate is the substance of your life. When I read Key magazine, I feel as if all the information has segregated me and shut me out. One of the articles tells you how much house one and a half million dollars can buy today. If you want to move to Szigetkoz, Hungary (no, I didn’t misspell it) you get a 30-acre, ten-bedroom castle. In New York City, you get a one-bedroom apartment with lava-stone kitchen countertops and the noise of the West Side Highway at your doorstep. That’s what I was going to have to do to save my life – move from my coveted idyllic village and find myself some Real Estate in New York City. I didn’t have a million dollars. I was going to have to really HUNT for a match like the innocent people in the New York Times they profile in The Hunt. Once I was at an open house in the Flatiron district. It was a one bedroom overlooking the big clock at Met Life. The apartment had a mirror tile wall and swooping metallic lamps and glass tables and