‘Brilliant. This book will be considered a masterpiece.’ – Sarah Sentilles, award-winning author of Draw Your Weapons and Stranger Care
An extraordinary memoir that reflects on memory and finding your voice after decades of silence.
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.
