![]() ![]() Often these lessons in language are tethered to current events in the memoir, and their impact is tangibly relatable. They take you, jarringly, out of the experience, and offer you opinions, insights, concerns, or most delightfully titbits about etymology and how we can trace words through language and time. Most of these photos take centre stage on a single page, often between the very brief chapters (which are usually 1-3 pages in length), and below most photos is a more intimate sentence or paragraph often written directly from Croft’s heart. What blends so pleasantly with the third-person narration approach is Croft’s sporadic embedding of raw and often unclear or borderline-surreal photography into the book. In our language, which is English, both love and life go back to the same root, which signified to leave.” “Zoe comes from ancient Greek, you know, for life. It’s a wise and honestly inspired choice of approach for a memoir. ![]() The third-person narration also adds a higher dimension to the memoir, allowing us a wider field of vision and allowing the sisters room to breathe within the story. Most impactfully, it encourages almost equal attention to be placed on both girls, and given how vital the life and experiences of Zoe are to the moulding of Amy as a person, this is very important. This is something I’ve never seen done in a memoir before, and it works to great effect in a number of ways. Amy is Jennifer, but presented to us with an altered name and a third-person narration rather than a first-person one. It’s in the naming of these girls that we see the first standout quality of Croft’s memoir. Homesickfollows the childhoods of two sisters, Amy and Zoe, growing up three years apart but nigh inseparable for most of their youth. ![]() On the subject of the English memoir as it now exists, Croft remarked in an interview with Asymptote Journal: “I also didn’t know the book was going to be about my sister when I started it, but as I wrote, I realized that all my fears and feelings of being adrift and homesick revolved around the precarity of her life and health when we were growing up, as well as now.” Homesickalso initially existed as a novel which Croft wrote in Spanish, titled Serpientes y escaleras. She grew up in an academic household in Oklahoma and lived through more successes and losses before the age of eighteen than most of us do before we hit middle-age.įollowing her recent translations of Flights and Accommodations (by Wioletta Greg), Homesickis her memoir. Jennifer Croft is the Booker International Prize-winning translator of Flights by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk (a truly groundbreaking translation worthy of a hundred Booker Prizes). ![]()
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