The Irrestistible Henry House

Sometimes you read the description of a book and you know you have to have it, no matter what the reviews say.* Author Lisa Grunwald was inspired to write The Irresistible Henry House when she happened upon these photos of Bobby Domecon on Cornell's website. Bobby Domecon was a practice baby who lived in a practice apartment at the university, where he was mothered by a rotation of Domestic Economics students for at least the first year of his life. Apparently there were many such practice babies, plucked from orphanages, at many universities throughout the states for around 40 years, until research in the 1960s began to demonstrate that infants needed to attach to a primary caregiver in order to develop normally. Grunwald wondered about how the babies raised this way would have fared later in life and her novel is an exploration of one such fictional baby's life. The first part of the book, about Henry's early childhood, his real mother, and the head of the practice baby program, is riveting. The later sections, in which Henry grows up and become an animator for Disney (working on the Mary Poppins movie) and then moves to London to work on Yellow Submarine, wander a little -- Grunwald obviously did a lot of research on the era and you can sometimes see the seams -- but the book is more than worth a read. It made me curious about the lives of the actual, real-life practice babies. I did some googling and discovered only a proposal for a documentary film about them, nothing more.

Of course, the children who stayed in orphanages would certainly be likely to develop attachment disorders as well. What makes the case of the practice babies so interesting is that they were considered to be superior candidates for later adoption because they were being raised using all the latest, most scientific methods and techniques.

Grunwald lists some of the books she read while she writing Henry. I've added the following ones to my own to-read list:

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

 Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children

 Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers

Dr. Spock: An American Life

Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession

*Most reviews of this book are mixed but tend toward the positive. I was surprised to read both a very negative and a very positive review of the book in The New York Times. I'm not sure what the point of this is -- while it was probably a relief to Grunwald to have such a great review follow such a bad one, surely there are so many books that deserve attention that the editors should have been loath to devote so much space to one book.

Comments

[Sara O'Leary]

Sounds fascinating, Steph. That "Girls That Went Away" makes me wonder if you've ever read Lynn Coady's novel Strange Heaven.

[Kerry Clare]

Carol Shields' Larry's Party references the practice babies too, I think...

[Steph]

I *have* read Strange Heaven, Sara. Were you at UBC with her?

And I'll have to check out Larry's Party, Kerry, thanks for the suggestion.

[Natalie @YMCBuzz]

So interesting. I had never heard of practice babies until now. Thanks for enlightening me!