Over the course of my ceaselessly peripatetic life, as a writer who’s lived all over the place, the word “home” has always carried a complicated meaning.
My tiny family of origin is fractured, far-flung, and nontraditional. By the time I was 15, we’d moved to four different houses in the Bay Area and three different towns in Arizona. Between kindergarten and 12th grade I was the perennial “new girl,” enrolling at eight different schools. My negligent, explosive father disappeared for good when I was 11. When my two sisters and I were in our teens, our mother announced, in a formal and final way, that she was done with mothering. She didn’t kick us out, by any means, but we all left home at 16.
Of course I don’t mean “home” in the conventional sense; there was no such place. Our mother moved to different houses every year or two, from Arizona to upstate New York, and we three sisters went off into the world to make our separate ways, understanding that home was, from now on, wherever we made it for ourselves.
After I graduated from high school in Rockland County, New York, I spent a year in France, attended college in Oregon and graduate school in Iowa, and then in 1989 I moved to New York City. I lived there for 20 years, in 11 different places, from downtown Brooklyn to the Upper West Side to the East Village to north Brooklyn to TriBeCa. In 2003, my then-husband and I bought and renovated an old row house in Greenpoint, but when I left the marriage five years later, I left the first house I’d ever owned. Along with intense grief and sadness for the death of my marriage, I deeply missed the place we’d worked so hard together to make beautiful and comfortable. It was the only real home I’d ever had as an adult.
Contrary to surface appearances, this constant motion of my life has been involuntary and counter to my desires. In fact, throughout my nomadic childhood and on into my equally nomadic adulthood, I’ve felt a powerful yearning to belong somewhere, to be from somewhere, wistfully envying people who grew up in one place, with lifelong close friends who grew up alongside them, in towns or communities they belonged to and could go back to without question. That cheery American expression “going home for the holidays” has always resonated for me with a sharp wistfulness, shading sometimes into sadness. I’ve never stayed anywhere long enough to put down roots. As I’ve moved on to new places, I have kept friends in the old ones, and that’s a kind of yearning feeling too—missing people I used to live close to, wishing they were still nearby.
