'She tells me she’s returning to every childhood home she lived in, and all the memories she can’t leave behind.
'The past, she says, it kind of owns me.
'I want permission to write her life while she lives it. I want to know why she is returning to the past at this stage of her life and why she can’t escape memories from decades ago. I want to know many things.
'But nobody writes a nobody’s life, she says.
'I want to reassure her. You’ve kept so many secrets from childhood and hidden from the world for so long, I say. And you’re not a nobody.
'In this memoir, through both her words and illustrations, Janine Mikosza revisits the fourteen houses she lived in before turning eighteen. Homesickness explores how we remember, the myriad ways a child’s trauma lives on in an adult’s body, responsibility versus accountability, and the shift from silence to finding a voice. It is about finally being believed when speaking the truth, and the consequences of a decades-long silence.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Homesickness is a memoir that strives, as Emily Dickenson urged, to tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Memoirs are reconstructions that seek to capture the voice and perspective of one or more of the writer’s younger selves. Their truth claims are subject to dispute, challenge, and counterclaim. But Melbourne artist and sociologist Janine Mikosza takes a more oblique approach to her subject and the result is a soaring view of the emotional trajectory of her life and of the philosophical questions that its telling raises. When Homesickness opens, she is having cake with a nervous and sometimes hostile woman who tells her to call her Jin as ‘It’s better than Janine.’ After she gets permission from the woman to write her story, it becomes clear that the two women are different iterations of the same person: the narrator is the memoirist, while Jin is the woman who lived her childhood trauma and is still struggling to process it. The book unfolds as a dialogue between author and protagonist, with the two often at cross-purposes, as Mikosza struggles to balance writing about the past with recovering from it.' (Introduction)
'Two women meet in a cafe. One asks permission to write the other’s life “while she lives it”. The writer is a compassionate and observant interlocutor. Her subject, Jin, is wary and evasive. Their conversation examines words survivors of violence live with: memory, forgetting, blame, denial, doubt.'
'I am accustomed to reading difficult things. I affectionately refer to my research as “morbid” and I have indeed read many heartbreaking, dark books.' (Introduction)
'Two women meet in a cafe. One asks permission to write the other’s life “while she lives it”. The writer is a compassionate and observant interlocutor. Her subject, Jin, is wary and evasive. Their conversation examines words survivors of violence live with: memory, forgetting, blame, denial, doubt.'
