House Within A House opens with a quote from Gloria Anzaldúa – “Beneath your desire for knowledge writhes the hunger to understand and love yourself”. The next page reveals an image of something – a tree? carpet? A wall? It’s at once entirely perceptible and indescribable,intangible, ineffable. House Within a House is about depression, simultaneously deeply academic and profoundly personal, shifting from narrative essays to emotionally charged poetry to pictures that seem to become clearer and clearer until they slip back into abstraction. The book isn’t particularly accessible – it effortlessly plays with form as metaphor, calls on dozens of past writings on depression, constantly switches languages to French and Spanish, explores the intersections between race, sexuality, gender, and mental health struggles, and the subject matter isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. The book ends with a nearly identical picture to the one it started with, but this time brighter, clearer, recontextualized, because to plunge into the infinite complexity that the 150 pages of House WIthin A House holds is to understand depression on a far deeper level than when you first open the cover and read the Anzaldúa quote.