Having lived in 14 houses before she was 18, Mikosza’s Homesickness is a dialogue between two versions of herself, as she interrogates her past – and tests her memory
, and in spite of her reluctance as a deeply private person, she kept being drawn to the idea of “turning a personal problem into an artistic problem and making something that … I can live with. As Calle put it, finding a ‘place for my suffering’.”
‘I talked to a version of myself out loud all the time when I was growing up. It was a survivor strategy.’In the book, Janine and Jin criss-cross the country by car to revisit the 14 houses Mikosza lived in before she turned 18. It’s a bid to explore the long-held childhood trauma she experienced in some of them, which lives on in her mind and body.
Mikosza spent decades circling around her past in other ways, before finally committing to a book in 2013. Mikosza weaves this prior work – first as an artist, then as a researcher with a PhD in sociology – into her memoir, even pasting images of it in, where they join the floor plans almost like a scrapbook.
In conversation, Mikosza is searingly intelligent and well-read, referencing Roland Barthes, Maggie Nelson and Brian Castro off the cuff. But she’s also funny and self-deprecating and all too cognisant of the fact that trauma is, well, so hot right now. As Jin contemplates in the book: “Some memoirists just crash through, or some write to seek revenge ... But I wanted to approach it with kindness. I don’t want revenge on any of the people in the book. That’s why it took so long. I kept thinking, ‘How do I write this book without having any other people in it?’”
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