I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a book made of two disparate, and drastically unequal, parts. The majority of the book concerns Finn and his relationships with two people: his brother Max, who is dying in hospice; and his former-girlfriend Lily, who has died by suicide... but is now joining Finn on a road trip. The second story is in epistolary form from a late-19th-century hotel owner to her deceased sister. As the New York Times review put it, the novel "braids a historical ghost story with a zombie romance."
Okay. So not surprisingly the book is about grief and loss and all the undefinable messiness that comes with it. The epistolary story is a bit mysterious and then jauntily shocking. The Finn romance is more complicated. I loved the early part of the story with Finn talking at Max's bedside. Moore captures the absurdity of the situation and the brothers' attempts to form meaning and maintain levity at the same time. However, halfway through the story, we shift to the zombie-romance road trip with Finn and the decaying-but-animated body of Lily. Here's where it gets trickier. The emphasis on Finn's conflicting feelings about Lily makes sense--how can you understand a relationship where one person wanted to end her life? What does that mean about her feelings about you? Your feelings for her? All fertile ground, but it's mixed into near-constant descriptions of Lily's decomposing body. Which, sure, emphasizes that Finn isn't talking to a real person, but rather a palimpsest of his ex-girlfriend, but it's still a lot. And I really don't want to read about someone having sex with a zombie.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed the book. Moore has a fantastic way with sentences--they hum with humor and meaning. There's a joke in almost every sentence, yet it doesn't feel overdone or hackneyed. It's the kind of book where you could do a deep-dive into just a single paragraph. Also the kind of book worth re-reading.
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