This story is based on a story from a tabloid newspaper. In Chicago at the end of the last century, an emigrant from Norway, Bella Paulson, killed her relatives, having previously purchased insurance on their lives. Then, deciding to expand the scope of her activities, she went to La Porte, Indiana. To this day, residents of La Porte remember the “death farm” there. It seemed to me that it is unlikely that anyone is capable of committing such cruel crimes for such a long time - unless some subconscious mechanism allowed Bella Paulson to regard her actions as necessary and normal. Such criminal madness, which becomes a real worldview, must undoubtedly have a colossal attractive force. My story is written from the perspective of eighteen-year-old Early. Of course, his mother, Dora, is not the emigrant Bella Paulson (who had daughters and no son), and the events in the story do not match the real ones. In my opinion, the main thing in the story is the relationship between mother and son, although I am not sure that, when Earley conceived, he wanted to tell only about the existence of a real family gang in the recent past. The title of the story conveys more than meets the eye—not every one of our homes is in order. And whether this house is on the plains or in the suburbs, it is inevitably seen as an integral part of the American landscape.E. L. Doctorow