Homesick
Published on 23. August 2022
219 pages
978-1-913867-32-4 (ISBN)
Description
Women's Prize for Fiction 2023 Finalist
The coming of age story of an award-winning translator, Homesick is about learning to love language in its many forms, healing through words and the promises and perils of empathy and sisterhood.
Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first. Amy's first love appears in the form of her Russian tutor Sasha, but when she enters university at the age of 15 her life changes drastically and with tragic results.
"Croft moves quickly between powerful scenes that made me think about my own sisters. I love how the language displays a child's consciousness. A haunting accomplishment." Kali Fajardo-Anstine
The coming of age story of an award-winning translator, Homesick is about learning to love language in its many forms, healing through words and the promises and perils of empathy and sisterhood.
Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first. Amy's first love appears in the form of her Russian tutor Sasha, but when she enters university at the age of 15 her life changes drastically and with tragic results.
"Croft moves quickly between powerful scenes that made me think about my own sisters. I love how the language displays a child's consciousness. A haunting accomplishment." Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Reviews / Votes
"Stunning and surprising." -New York Times"A Boundary-Expanding Story Of Devotion And Growing Up" -NPR.org
"Poignant, creative, and unique" -Kirkus
"A tribute to the deep bond of sisterhood: how, over years navigating life, it stretches apart and snaps back." -The Scotsman
"HOMESICK is an incantatory and masterful work of art."" -Marisa Silver , author of MARY COIN and LITTLE NOTHING
"A poignant and moving meditation on family, friendship and place."" -Thomas Chatterton Williams , author of LOSING MY COOL
"A marvel: audacious and lyrical."" -Vu Tran , author of DRAGONFISH
"Change is life, and Homesick is an exercise in conscious, delicate, joyful change." -LA Review of Books
"[Croft] has created a memoir that is at once different from any other yet far more intimate." -Books and Bao
"Astonishing in its emotional reach, its evocation of a child's discovery and a young adult's suffering and all the wonder of words." -Shelf Awareness
"[A] marvel of a book that magically expresses the untranslatable." -Foreword Reviews
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Not illustrated
ISBN-13
978-1-913867-32-4 (9781913867324)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Jennifer Croft is the author of Homesick and Serpientes y escaleras and the co-winner with Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk of The International Booker for the novel Flights . She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times , The New York Review Daily , The Paris Review Daily , The Los Angeles Review of Books , Granta , Tin House , BOMB , n+1 , Guernica , The Guardian , The Chicago Tribune and elsewhere. For Charco Press, she has translated Federico Falco's A Perfect Cemetery (2021) and Sylvia Molloy's Dismantling (forthcoming 2022).
Content
- Intro
- Homesick
- PART ONE: SICK
- Even though she knows she's not supposed to, Amy looks forward to tornados
- Their mom gets them ready for all the possible disasters that might ever occur
- When a tornado happens at their grandparents' house, day still turns to night and the leaves still get upside down and the cars still disappear, but they also get to hide in the hall closet, which is full of their dad's old games from when he was their age
- Amy has taken one Polaroid picture of each room at her grandparents' house, including the garage, the backyard, and the front yard, and two of the staircase, since they don't have one at home
- Every summer the girls go to Camp Waluhili with their mom, who works there as a counselor
- Amy takes a picture of the little red suitcase Zoe uses to run away from home
- Amy takes pictures of everywhere they go
- The night before the girls go back to school their mom tells them what sex is and reads them a story about a woman in a car crash off a bridge
- The girls dance and dance and dance to Paul Simon's Graceland in the dining room, working themselves up into a frenzy, while their mom makes oatmeal fudgies in the kitchen for them to take for Labor Day to school
- Amy is the tallest kid in her grade, and the fastest, and the best at math
- In the back of the ambulance, her sister has been taken over by a ghost
- The ambulance takes them to the pink hospital by their grandparents' house
- Amy knows exactly what she would do if they got into a car crash off a bridge
- Sometimes their mom sings them lullabies, and Amy likes her voice but not the songs
- Nobody can tell what's really wrong with Zoe, not even the doctors, not for a long time
- One day Zoe and the dog are intercepted by the neighbors two doors down
- Zoe starts taking medication that makes her wet the bed
- Once there was a boy at camp who loved fish
- Sometimes when they all go to the hospital together, their dad takes Amy to the maternity ward to see the babies
- At home Amy takes her pictures out of her fossil drawer and goes over them one by one, looking for clues about the tumor
- Amy and Zoe are taking time off school
- On the day before the surgery they all go to their grandparents' house and have root beer floats and watch TV and Sleeping Beauty
- When the phone rings the ground drops out and Zoe is gone
- While her sister's in the hospital, Amy is in charge of the dog
- One day at the hospital Amy tries to play Snakes and Ladders with some dying kids, but after just a little while they say she's cheating, and she has to go back to just waiting
- Zoe is released from the hospital on Amy's ninth birthday
- Amy takes a picture of Zoe on the couch with the dog and the octopus with big huge eyes
- For Christmas they get matching pairs of tennis shoes from their grandparents
- The girls like to dance together when their parents aren't home
- Amy and Zoe fall in love for the first time, at the same time, with the same boy
- The girls get their periods within a day of each other
- Amy sends secret messages to her sister that her sister can't read
- Over the summer Amy perfects her knots
- There is an aisle at the Medex that the girls never visit
- Of the apparently infinite quantity of delights offered to Amy by her recent forays into the garden of Russian grammar, the single most fascinating fact is that in the present tense, the verb to be literally goes without saying, so that in order to express, for instance, Amy is in love, you would only need Amy in love, or at most a dash: Amy - in love. Sasha is my teacher would just be Sasha - my teacher
- During the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer the girls do nothing else
- Zoe still has seizures, but not as often as before, and when she does they aren't as bad
- Three things happen in 1995
- Sasha and Amy are reaching the end of their first-year textbook
- Amy knows when Zoe lets the squirrels loose at last that her sister's secret hope is they will choose to return someday, but Amy also knows they won't
- Amy wears perfume to Sasha's play
- Everyone in the family is aware that Sasha will be graduating soon
- Although few people do it, it is possible to go to college early, without even getting a GED
- The week of Sasha's graduation they have one last class
- Amy does not mention to Zoe what has happened between Sasha and her
- It is their mom who breaks the news to them, one by one, Amy first
- To get away from Zoe, Amy transfers all her operations to underneath the pear tree in between the front yard and the backyard
- Because Sasha shot himself in the mouth rather than at the temple, they are able to do an open-casket funeral
- On August 10, 1997, they move Amy into her dorm
- Amy lives in the Honors House, in the middle of fraternity row
- The next day Amy meets people
- But the next day Amy becomes famous
- In the front-page picture Amy's long blond hair rolls smooth as a single piece of silk over her shoulders
- Zoe and their parents pick her up at six to celebrate
- Back in her room Amy peers out the window listening to the music that resounds from downstairs
- Amy doesn't know exactly how to be in class
- One of Amy's classes is Photography I
- The day of the Lambda Chi luau Amy takes a picture of the pack
- One Wednesday in mid-November Amy comes home from class and finds Zoe making a fort out of the desk in her dorm room
- Ever since Zoe ran away from home their dad comes to visit at the Honors House, trying to broker an agreement between Zoe and their mom
- On Thanksgiving at their grandparents' they have turkey and stuffing, rehydrated potato flakes, and cranberry sauce slid straight out of the can, with the grooves still in it, jiggling
- They put the house up for sale
- A lot of their stuff they're getting rid of, whatever they no longer need
- In the spring semester, Amy takes Russian Conversation, Russian Poetry, English Literature Prior to 1800, The French Revolution, and Photography II, which is her favorite
- The next day you make the prints, and the best part of everything is when you slide the white paper into the tray and gently make the waves of solution wash over it, back, forth, back, forth, and slowly, slowly, the image unfolds
- Not people die but worlds die in them
- Amy agrees to go to a youth group meeting with Katie without knowing what exactly youth group meeting means
- Zoe has been diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus, which explains the pain, and hemochromatosis, which is a genetic mutation that prevents her body from processing the iron it takes in, and they also think her brain tumor might have started growing back
- Amy has never liked to shower at the Honors House, but now it hurts
- According to their mother, suicide is the most selfish thing you can do
- One night, in the middle of the night, Amy sneaks downstairs to the living room in the Honors House to take the rest of the cough syrup samples
- Amy knows it is time for her to go back upstairs to her room now, but she is afraid
- It has been a long time since Amy gave any thought to losing her virginity, or to her first kiss
- At dawn the next day Amy calls her grandparents, who are annoyed to be awakened but who come to pick her up and take her home with them
- In the middle of the night, Amy sneaks downstairs and takes her grandpa's car keys from the big ceramic bowl in the hallway and drives east
- On Monday, Amy can't speak Russian anymore
- She tries to write a letter to her sister
- Amy wakes up in a white room with a minister who is holding her hand
- Amy tries to get out of bed but finds she is tethered to machines
- She wakes up and sees her mom standing over her and flinches, and then her mom starts yelling
- A nurse wheels her down to the thirteenth floor
- PART TWO: HOME
- People say the world will end when midnight strikes December 31 of 1999, but Amy comes to hope it won't, and then it doesn't, and then she graduates from the University of Tulsa and flies to Berlin
- Now new worlds with new languages let Amy in
- There is the world of trains
- Instead of getting homesick Amy goes to a café and orders un café crème s'il vous plaît
- There is the world of men, the inhabitants of which Amy's only dimly glimpsed till now
- One day Amy wakes up wanting
- The breeze at Tempelhof is gentle
- There is a picture of an insect in the yellow fronds at the center of a big white flower
- in the background a dozen giant wet green leaves, flat and sometimes ragged at the edges
- Every picture is a portrait of Zoe because Amy's intentions as a photographer have never wavered, although she herself had never known of them till now
- The breeze picks up
- Dear Sister
- The sun's still low on the horizon when she's done
- The last portrait Amy takes of her sister is a picture of some hot pink letters on the thick transparent railing of the Pont des Arts
