During the early 1970s, James Baldwin's reputation dwindled. Despite his visible commitment to the civil rights movement a decade earlier, critics and younger writers, among them Amiri Baraka, began to denounce the writer as passé, a self-styled transatlantic commuter who was out of touch with US politics and culture. In 1948 Baldwin had left the United States for France, where he remained for the rest of his life, despite frequent trips back to North America, and to Turkey, where he lived for an interrupted decade during the 1960s. After decades of shuttling between countries and houses, Baldwin moved to the small Provençal town of St. Paul-de-Vence in 1971, where he remained until his death in 1987.

In Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France, Magdalena J. Zaborowksa examines the impact and significance of the author's final home on his life and work in ways which open up new avenues of enquiry in the burgeoning field of Baldwin studies. Few scholars have focussed on Baldwin's late career, with the exception of Lynn Orilla Scott's valuable monograph James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey (2002) and Joseph Vogel's recent study James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era (2018). Much of the renewed interest in the author in the last few years – including Raoul Peck's award-winning documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016) – focusses on Baldwin's role as a public figure and disturber of the peace, further illustrated by his often-cited inspiration to the Black Lives Matter movement. By turning her attention to Baldwin's final home and reading his late work through theories of space, place, and domesticity, Zaborowska adds much to the growing critical and biographical corpus centred on this enigmatic American author.

Me and My House is at its most compelling when Zaborowska disinters archival hoards pertaining to Baldwin and his final years. As a literary-critic-cum-archaeologist, Zaborowska documents her several visits to “Chez Baldwin,” as the house in St. Paul-de-Vence was known. Zaborowska's study is replete with photographs which bear witness to the slow decay of Baldwin's house and his archive of books, records, and pictures, which have yet to be housed in a museum or library. During her extensive research, Zaborowska interviews a number of Baldwin's close friends, including Lucien Happersberger, the dedicatee of Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956), whose chalet in the Swiss village of Loèche-les-Bains provided the writer space and peace to finish his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). Zaborowska provides deft readings of Baldwin's late, unpublished play, The Welcome Table, as well as a compelling analysis of the final sheet of paper left in the author's typewriter. One of the strengths of the book is the way in which Zaborowska expands the notion of a writer's archive to include not only draft manuscripts and annotated books, but also his revealing book collection – which includes many works by female African American authors – and the homely objects with which he forged a domestic space.

Me and My House also provides useful readings of Baldwin's last two novels, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just above My Head (1979), both of which have received scant scholarly attention. For Zaborowska, who cites Baldwin's statement, in reference to fiction writing, that “all the characters are some facet of you” (285), the author's late works reveal much about his own views on domesticity. As she observes, after the early 1970s, the writer “moves away from a focus on black masculinity toward black femininity in his subsequent works” (219). There's a poignancy to Zaborowska's claim that “his late essays, the last play and literary testament of the The Welcome Table signal that Baldwin had big plans for thinking about writing about domesticity” (210), as his final home, caught up in protracted legal disputes, has been partially torn down to make way for developers. The demolished rooms include his living quarters and study, the room he referred to as his “torture chamber.”

Zaborowka's unique access to Baldwin's archival material, and her invaluable interviews with close friends of the author, provide rich pickings for Baldwin scholars and enthusiasts – but at times Me and My House seems uncertain of its audience. The book contains fresh and vibrant accounts of Baldwin's house and his final years, as well as useful readings of his later work, but on occasion the critical narrative lacks brio, in particular when Zaborowska jostles to be heard amongst the cast of theorists she deploys, among them Gaston Bachelard and Darell Fields. In a discussion of Baldwin's resistance to sexual categorization, Zaborowska acknowledges that “what Baldwin is doing here is refusing to be theorized” (63), which carries echoes of the author's insistence that all theories are suspect. These caveats notwithstanding, Me and My House is an important contribution to the field from one of the leading Baldwin scholars.