Three Rooms

Virginia Woolf famously wrote, “A woman must have money and a room of her own.” But it’s the 21st century and what a woman needs now is her own apartment — something entirely unattainable for our protagonist, a young woman who lives in a series of rented rooms in Oxford and London. Three Rooms unfolds over a year as she tries to live a meaningful life and find a job that will pay the rent.

“The reason I wrote this book is because I had kind of given up on my own eternal struggle—I moved back home with my parents to be able to write, and I was thinking about why it was so difficult, in London, specifically, to make a proper home. As for how that overlaps with the political, I couldn’t separate it, because we’ve had a Conservative government in this country for over a decade now, and it’s impossible to separate the decline in quality of life and the ability to afford a home from the policies they’ve instated. If you want to reference A Room of One’s Own, Woolf makes a good point that, of course, a woman must have a room of her own, but the case she makes for why that hasn’t happened—why our mothers haven’t gone to work and handed down money to us—is because those mothers were busy creating homes. The very fact that she was able to write is because she had family money from her aunt, and so the context that she’s speaking from is slightly depoliticized,” Hamya explains.

Three Rooms is full of astute observations on modern life, and her language pulled me in. The way she gets at current politics (Brexit, rising nationalism, etc.) through the lens of one woman is remarkable. I’m going to be thinking about this novel for a long time.