The Book

HERE’S WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING:

Do we own our possessions, or do they own us?  This will definitely attract the “Antiques Roadshow” crowd.     –BOOKLIST

In her touching book, Tracy reminds us of the power of family and memory, symbolism and loss.    –THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL

It’s a tale almost every American can relate to. Collectors looking for some good summer reading won’t want to miss this book.    – THE DETROIT NEWS

Lisa Tracy shares a laugh with the audience at Moonstone Arts Center in Philadelphia, where she read from "Objects of Our Affection" and signed books on April 15, 2010. For other author appearances, click on the Events link above.

“Lisa Tracy’s Objects of Our Affection is a marvelous mix of tenacity and tenderness. Yes, it is about the history of certain carefully collected heirlooms; but it is also about something much greater… the soul of a family, any family, our expectations and regrets, our loves and losses, our search for meaning and belonging in the things that fill our houses and our hearts.”

—Robert Goolrick, author of A Reliable Wife

“Plush stories of love, war, life and death are lovingly tucked inside the drawers and chair springs of a remarkable family’s furnishings. Lisa Tracy brings them to life with tender humor and due respect.”

—Tanya Maria Barrientos, author of Family Resemblance

“This is a book that gathers emotional momentum as you read it. Gradually you realize it is a rare look at the women who have devoted their lives to the men who have fought America’s wars. I read the closing chapters with tears in my eyes.”

—Thomas Fleming, author of The Officers’ Wives and West Point: The Men and Times of the U.S.Military Academy

After their mother’s death, Lisa Tracy and her sister Jeanne were left with several households’ worth of belongings. After 10 years of paying storage fees, the sisters reluctantly decided to take them to auction. The result is a captivating personal memoir that captures why Americans are so obsessed with our things—and why we find it so difficult to let go.

In Objects of Our Affection: Uncovering My Family’s Past, One Chair, Pistol, and Pickle Fork at a Time (A Bantam Hardcover; March 23, 2010), Lisa Tracy invites us into the rich history of a military family characterized by duty, hardship, honor, and devotion—qualities embodied in the very items she chronicles. Here she shares with us a collection unlike any other: silver gewgaws, mismatched cake plates, silk tapestries, dueling pistols that once belonged to Aaron Burr (no, not those pistols), a stately storage chest from Boxer Rebellion–era China, even a chair in which George Washington may or may not have sat. Dating back to the American Revolution, the furniture and other artifacts Tracy lovingly describes were collected over the course of centuries by ancestors posted all over the globe, cherished and passed down to her generation as an emblem of who her forebears were, what they had done, and where they had been.

A paean to the pack rat in us all, Objects of Our Affection offers an offbeat and intriguing mix of cultural anthropology, Antiques Roadshow Americana, and military history. In this engaging and deeply moving book, Tracy chronicles the wondrous interior life of those possessions and discovers that the roots of Americans’ passion for acquisition often lie not in shallow materialism but in our innermost desire to possess the most treasured commodity of all: a connection to our past.