The House Is the Body: On Kim-Anh Schreiber’s “Fantasy”

IN KIM-ANH SCHREIBER’S debut, cross-genre novel Fantasy, everything happens in the house and on the screen. Schreiber’s multidimensional text marries personal and familial narrative with a close reading of House, the 1977 film by Nobuhiko Obayashi. The house is the body shared across generations, inhabited both psychically and physically. The house blends and filters history, memory, personality, identity. The house has no doors, no outside. Stuck in the house, we are stuck in reality, left only with our imagination. Fantasy is a strategy to understand ourselves through the house, the home, the linked chains between us and others, between inside and outside. Fantasy extends the interior to the exterior. Fantasy brings everything inside.

When Fantasy was published in March 2020, it coincided with a seemingly collective confinement. Staying indoors became necessary, even required. Escaping outdoors was a way to connect while mired with risk. For many, this quickly gave way to a feeling of isolation and alienation. Virtual connection increased the prominence of the screen — connecting one interior to another. In April that year, Obayashi, the director of House, passed away. A year later, Schreiber’s book feels like a prescient and precognitive reflection on the recent past, offering a way to cope with and comprehend how we define ourselves in relation to the houses we occupy, houses that might consume us.

Intermingling first-person memories with her critical interpretation of House, Schreiber charts out a story that builds on top of itself, without any singular narrative. Named after the genre itself, Fantasy doesn’t exist in another, speculative world — though it might. Instead, Schreiber combs through a series of interiors to propose a new, fantastic way of living in world we are already in. The book’s title is also shared with one of Obayashi’s characters. However, Fantasy is not House’s protagonist, but rather her best friend. Fantasy is part of the group of friends who accompany the character Gorgeous on a trip to visit her maternal home, where a lonely aunt still resides. This house, we soon learn, is haunted by memories of pain and loss, embodied by the murderous ghost of Gorgeous’s aunt. As each of the girls falls victim to otherworldly tricks, it is Fantasy who is the first to see what is really happening and the only girl whose death remains unseen, uncertain. A witness to the world around her, she is first ignored by her friends, who see her only as her unbelievable, dreamy, fantastic archetype. 

Fantasy begins with a childhood memory. Our narrator — an unnamed character with similarities to the author, who I refer to as the daughter — listens to and laughs with her mother while sitting in the lap of her favorite aunt. They are reminiscing over old photographs her grandparents have brought back from their recent trip to Vietnam, where they had left 20 years prior during the Fall of Saigon. These photographs and heirlooms are stand-ins for everything that had been left behind.

In this initial chapter, titled “Cold Open,” Schreiber sets up the framework for the text to follow, combining memory with a bit of critical hindsight and a nod to the technical styles of film and television. The house and the screen. Schreiber positions the reader to view the scene from the daughter’s perspective, but the more the daughter looks for specific details inside this memory, she realizes she has never seen any of the photos or documents from that day again. Instead, the daughter recalls only the atmosphere of the house. The memories themselves are all affect, “laughter: wild and free.”

In Fantasy, one can never really be sure if a memory is real or made up. Imagination itself becomes an important tool for the daughter to establish a fantastic sense of reality; she is a child of a German immigrant and a Vietnamese refugee, who are divorced parents, and she does not speak the languages of her family. Recognizing that she has never really inhabited one space, she now sees that “I had spent my whole life making one world out of many different places.” This instability allows her to recognize that it might not matter if she remembers things exactly as they happened. Instead, she looks to these “fantasy memories” as a way of generating her own narrative, “The story grows as I grow.”

The daughter recalls first watching House, in the book’s second section, “Rules of Style,” soon after injuring her spine. In the gruesome yet campy horror of the film, she recognizes something she both desires and remembers. A vision of her life, a vision of herself, manifests onscreen. The pain in her body can be mapped onto the acts and transformations of the house. The connections in her own life might be understood, however obliquely, through the disappearance of each girl into the world of the house. As each girl suffers, it is easy to mistake screams and cries with a wicked kind of laughter: wild and free. Fantasy bridges pain and pleasure.

Obayashi’s film thrives on this sort of sensorial confusion, exemplified in its quirky special effects. Rather than attempting to make the impossible seem real, the film revels in calling attention to the false, fantastic elements of this impossible world. Schreiber picks apart the various techniques and visual effects used in Obayashi’s film, focusing on instances of disfigurement: the ways in which the face — the self — is fractured, most often by the house itself. Through understanding the techniques of the film, Fantasy extends these special effects, showing how they might function outside of movies, in memories, in real life.

In the third, and longest, section of the book, Schreiber constructs a familial narrative from a sequence of fragmented scenes. Titled after a safety manual written by her grandfather and father, both engineers, “Anatomy of a Critical Incident” deconstructs the daughter’s understanding of her body as an independent entity — looking for the ways it is shaped by the affective and sensory world it inhabits. Here, her memories almost always return to the house. For example, remembering her time in Catholic school, her inability to take communion, and her role as the star in the holiday pageant, the daughter comes to think of religion as just “an accoutrement of another time,” a memory that she could take off as easily as it was put on. “If my family had believed, it might have felt different. It might have felt like a house with no exit and no windows, with no way to imagine the outside.” Even her memory of the original “Anatomy of a Critical Incident” is anchored to the house, of watching her grandfather “disappearing into an attic door I had never noticed” to retrieve the book.

While the daughter attempts to make one house out of the “shifting sands” she was born on, her mother is forever looking to get out of the house. Her mother first leaves home as a teen, then leaves her husband and daughter, and continues to leave until she finally creates a life without a house at all. As the daughter gets older, she drifts apart from her mother, as they are both drawn to opposing poles of the world around them, defining themselves not through one another but in contrast. While their connection to one another may be tenuous, they are both tethered to the memories of their maternal home. In one scene, the daughter recounts a story from before her birth. Her mother has just left home and is evading a phone call in which each of her sisters tries to persuade her to come home. She relents when she is finally told that one of her sisters has disappeared. The daughter feels this loss as her own, as if this were her own memory, as if she were an extension of her mother, her aunts, her grandmother, and despite never learning exactly what happened. By not knowing the specifics, the daughter is able to imagine a world where the missing sister is not gone, just lost from the house. The daughter imagines walking down the street with her mother and bumping into the sister. Though the trauma of their disconnection is not forgotten, fantasy allows for the possibility that one day she could return home.

As the daughter takes inventory of these memories, she tries to identify what about them might be real, what might be imagined, and where that distinction might not matter. Throughout this process, the daughter comes to see her memories as media images — photographs and films. As much as her memory is anchored to the house, it is mediated through the camera lens and the screen. This echoes a scene in House, in which Gorgeous shares her family’s backstory on the train ride to visit her aunt and the memory is seen, by the characters and audience alike, through the train window, like a movie or a newsreel. Always attentive to these rules of style, Schreiber calls out this conflation between the experience of those inside the film and those outside, watching it.

Even when the daughter’s narrative finds its way outside the house, it retains the structure through which every memory is framed. “The third time my mom left home we were not home at all; we were at the mall.” Arguing over a dress in Limited Too, the daughter cries, “It’s just not my personality!” But her mother rejects any notion that the daughter might have a sense of self outside the boundaries of the mother herself, responding, “I think it’s your personality! And I should know — I’m your mother after all!” Despite their conflict, they both view the world through its exterior layers: how their clothing and style can suggest an intimate, interior sense of self. How reality is something you make through projection. Leaving the mall, the daughter waits for her mother to get the car. Her mother goes outside and does not return. “Too bad, I can only remember these scenes like shots in a film, the story of her leaving me.” The daughter is left in the house alone with her memories on the screen.

With her mother gone, the daughter feels as if the tethers to the maternal home have been snipped. Even on visits to Bà, her maternal grandmother, she struggles to feel at ease. Her use of Vietnamese slips away, her place in the house growing smaller. The daughter develops a sort of bifurcated self, one connected to her subconscious mind and the other to her conscious body. Both are rooted in the homes of her grandmothers. “Bà’s house is the house of my dreams. Anytime I dream of a house, it’s hers […] it’s my elemental house, the stage for my psyche. But Omi’s house is the house I know in my heart […] is my earliest instrument, where each sound is a sonic coordinate to my emotional life.”

The final section of Fantasy is a script, perhaps for a play or — more likely — a movie, titled “The Maternal Ecology.” Various characters are introduced across several settings. While they might seem like iterations of the characters we have encountered so far, it is difficult to pin any of them down into a single role. The reader is cautioned: the domestic space of each setting is made of many layers, and “in every scene we may be in any and all of these layers at once.” Dialogue merges with exposition — characters verbalize their actions and narrate their experience, seemingly aloud, “I open the window to the fire escape and smoke a cigarette.” These characters tell instead of show — inverting what we might expect from a theatrical performance.

The first setting is inhabited by the exaggerated personas of two flowers, Karma and Khaos, mother and daughter. This house stretches three miles but has no doors or windows to the outside. Instead, screens are embedded onto every surface. Moving from room to room, Khaos searches for Karma and “poses for a photo taken somewhere by a camera implanted in a pore of a surface’s skin.” The house is a body, the house is a television.

In another setting, the elements from outside cannot be kept from encroaching inward. Here, Daughter (possibly the same daughter as our previous narrator) briefly moves in with Mother, though she soon learns that her mother is not really there, disappearing into new places as quick as she can. Eventually, Mother begins living in hotel rooms. The glamour of room service replaces the burden of the kitchen. Over and over again, the mother finds doors in the wall, slipping out as easily as she slips between outfits — always into something more hip and sexy.

In both of these story lines, daughter and mother struggle to define themselves. Karma and Mother insist that the self is found outside. But Khaos refuses, “Oh no. Outside? No. Why would you do that? We’re making memories!” Similarly, Daughter reminds, “Mother, staying inside is safe.” Soon, the distinctions between these different mothers and daughters become harder to maintain. Just as in House — where Gorgeous stares into the mirror to see her reflection flicker between herself, her mother, and her aunt — each of these characters is at once a single entity, fractured endlessly, and several selves conjoined together.

The two settings increasingly overlap and new characters are introduced: a band of Sister flowers, as well as Grandma V and Grandma Z. But the house in which they have all gathered begins an unbelievable descent. Daughter watches television with her grandmothers, while Khaos gives birth to her own daughter, surrounded by her ever-multiplying group of Sisters. The house starts burning around them, though everyone continues on, seemingly unconcerned about the destruction around them. Daughter worries how she will ever maintain this impossible house that she has inherited, but her Grandmother Z reassures her that she “was born into a Dynasty of Survivors.”

Through these acts of imagination, Schreiber shows us how to bring the house to life, how to turn the house on. The house is not a confined interior, but a private space to process the public events of life. In our own moment, when life outdoors is burdened with the risk of illness, an experience of the outside world might even be created through the imaginative force of the inside world. Through Fantasy we see things that perhaps might not actually be there, that might not really be happening, but are no less real. Like a child playing make-believe, Fantasy is a strategy of an interior life, for understanding the self through sensation. The way to see what is or isn’t happening inside or outside the house is through the screen. The screen is the camera is the wall is the house. In Fantasy, the interior is always recorded and broadcast.

Schreiber’s world is made up of women — teenagers, mothers, and ghosts — seemingly trapped at home, positioned inside a lineage of movies and television including Grey Gardens, Pretty Little Liars, as well as House. One of Fantasy’s most salient references is Keeping Up with the Kardashians. After 14 years, the Kardashians have just begun the 20th, and final, season of their reality show. Perhaps more than any other of Fantasy’s predecessors, none have confronted the entanglement of privacy and publicity as much as the Kardashians — the details of their family squabbles, individual alterations manifested in their homes, wardrobes, and bodies. Its influence is seen throughout Fantasy, whether in the confusing bonds between mother, daughter, and sister or the pressures they all feel living “an art-directed life.” 

Switching between various styles and tone, Schreiber builds on the associative potential of fantasy itself. Khaos prays, “Under the light of play and pretend may we act in brand new ways.” In Fantasy, the house is where we learn how expansive our sense of self can be, connecting the rooms that we inherit with the places we build for ourselves. Recognizing that the house is not always “home,” it nevertheless remains a physical place burdened with psychic meaning. By stretching the contours of what we consider reality, by allowing ourselves the freedom to remember things with a bit of imagination, Fantasy reveals a new dynamic between inside and outside, whether the literal walls of a physical space or the emotional boundaries between parent and child. Through fantasy, we can build an exterior world from the confines of our own interior.

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Anthony Graham is a writer and curator in San Diego. He is the associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.