Homesickness

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 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.

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 childhood lives on in an adult’s body, and responsibility versus accountability. It is about finally being believed when speaking the truth, and the consequences of a decades-long silence.