How to Build a Home for the End of the World

Book excerpt: How To Build a Home for the End of the World is a case study in three parts, authored by Californian anthropologist, Dr. Maria Camphor, and commissioned by the International Program for the Advancement and Longevity of the Universal Body. Contained within this frame, the 'case' is the story of Donny, a carpenter who renovates houses nobody lives in, and his daughter Mary-Beth, who is hell-bent on following her first love, Ida, to California, where she has gone to seek care for a chronic illness.Together, father and daughter must go on a road trip across a waterless American wasteland, populated by a cast of angels and ghosts, revolutionaries and academics, performance artists and desert hippies. Along the way, they must reckon with past mistakes, a broken home, and their own contentious relationship with each other. What home, if any, can we build in the face of oblivion? What is love like when memory, bodily integrity and relationships disintegrate? How do we deal with our staggering fragility when bodies and families are dismembered and reassembled? How can we still find time for joy and love and beauty without dishonest platitudes? How do we negotiate hope and despair? This novel explores these questions.