Homesickness by Janine Mikosza
“Just to be clear, she states. I’m no saint. But I have no desire to write autobiography into my fiction or write a memoir or speak about what happened except in a general way.”
To get personal for a moment: from 2019 to 2022, I worked for an author mentoring service and publisher called Ultimate 48 Hour Author. Over these years, I edited 21 books: all non-fiction, all by women, and, for the majority, memoir.
These memoirs were confessional and conversational, deeply personal, sometimes spiritual, and often enmeshed with the tenets of self-help books: here is what happened to me, here are the lessons I learnt which helped me heal, and here I’m going to share them with you. They were linear, chronological, and charted the major turning points in their lives and journeys. The motivation for many of these women, as publisher Natasa Denman would say, was to tell their story, and to heal.
I was reminded of these books when reading Homesickness (2022) by Australian writer Janine Mikozsa, which is a raw, honest and unconventional memoir that explores truth, trauma and memory, as well as how to write about them. Mikosza’s book differs in its distinctive use of literary devices to tell her own story of trauma and childhood abuse, and how it has shaped and affected her as an adult.
The book takes the form of a conversation between Janine’s writer persona (the “I” of the book) and herself (referred to by her childhood nickname “Jin”), as the two delve into the fourteen houses Jin lived in throughout her childhood. Treating herself as a character is an innovative way to tackle the question of how to write a memoir when your memory has been affected by trauma. Jin has no memories before the age of eight, while her childhood and adolescence were marked by this series of constant moves, physical abuse and depression.
Early on, she mentions that the tipping point for her ‘breakdown’ - and eventual motivation for writing the book - began in early 2015, during the royal commissions into institutional responses to child sexual abuse and family violence, which caused crippling flashbacks to her childhood. She says:
“So many interviews with adults who had survived childhood violence. Such sadness, anger, fear. Listening to it all pouring out. Fuck me.”
This separation between self and character also mirrors the dislocation and dissociation that Jin feels as a result of her childhood trauma. She goes foggy, retreats into herself, stays in bed, and sometimes has suicidal thoughts. Even as an adult, Jin’s trauma is still so raw that it’s “like it all happened yesterday,” while Janine has to gently tease out difficult or painful details and memories. The memoir therefore isn’t linear or chronological, but, as Jin describes it, fragmentary, looping and crooked.
In this way, we also get an insight into the process of writing itself – the raw, dogged work of it. But Jin makes it very clear that writing is not therapy. Janine asks:
“Is writing ever therapeutic for you?
Do you mean cathartic? A purging?
I mean therapeutic.
It’s twisting the knife in the wound, she says. Art is not therapy.
I didn’t say it was therapy. I asked if it was therapeutic.”
Jin is also an artist, and begins to draw the floorplans of her fourteen childhood homes, which appear throughout the book. This helps to give structure to her memories even as they are incomplete, or shift and change in retellings. Each chapter is also named for a different room or space in the house and the meaning of ‘home’ as a psychic space is mused over throughout the book. The book asks: when a home is supposed to be a sanctuary, what happens when this is taken away, violently?
There are lights in the darkness, however: a psych nurse called Marc, a therapist tellingly called Verity, her husband Brett and her son. And the relationship between the two women is also filled with warmth and humour – particularly with Jin’s straight talking and potty mouth – and the moments when it flows naturally, like a dialogue between two characters, are the most successful. It can occasionally become stilted or over-explanatory, which can tug you out of the story – and in the beginning, the book does take a while to pick up pace and electricity. Some of the most powerful storytelling is when Jin reveals the complicity and complexity of her affair with a writer – the gaslighting, emotional abuse and toxic behaviour she suffered, as she shares snippets of their conversation she recorded on post-it notes.
Homesickness reminded me of Yiyun Li’s Where Reason Ends (2019), a novel that is made up of imagined dialogues between a mother and her son who took his own life, as well as Ruhi Lee’s memoir Good Indian Daughter (2021), where Lee contends with the abuse she suffered at the hands of her parents once she has a baby of her own. Both books have darkness and humour in equal measure, like Homesickness.
This book’s great strength is how it reveals trauma as something that impacts a life on an ongoing and everyday level. But if art (or writing) isn’t therapy, as Jin says, why write?
“I want to say this is what happened, Jin replies, and believe myself.”
To be your own witness, to believe yourself, to tell your own side of the story: this is the why. It doesn’t come easy. Healing, understanding and an acceptance of herself happen through hard work – gradually and incrementally – but they do happen. While Jin refutes the terms “victim” and “survivor,” Janine pushes her to see that surviving or healing is not a linear or overnight process: it is constant “reconstruction and transformation.”
“Life as renovation,” Janine adds, with another apt architectural metaphor.
Jin responds with her characteristic dark humour: “Oh fuck, she says. It’s never going to end is it?”
Many thanks to Ultimo Press for an advance review copy.
Emily Riches is a writer and editor from Mullumbimby, currently living on Gadigal land (Sydney). She founded Aniko Press to bring passionate writers and curious readers together, discover new voices and create a space for creative community. You can get in touch at emily@anikopress.com.