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 at this stage of her life 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.

PRaise for homesickness

The Guardian’s 25 Best Australian Books of 2022

‘Janine Mikosza presents her stunning memoir as a long conversation between two warring halves of herself…’

—The Guardian

Best reads of the year: Top writers reveal the books they loved in 2022

‘A brilliant and original memoir.’

—Sydney Morning Herald/The Age

‘Brilliant. A book that will be considered a masterpiece.’

—Sarah Sentilles, award-winning author of Draw Your Weapons & Stranger Care

‘An extraordinary book — spare, immaculate and utterly original. Janine Mikosza is some kind of genius.’

—Lucy Treloar, award-winning author of Salt Creek & Wolfe Island

‘Janine Mikosza presents her extraordinary memoir about surviving childhood trauma as a conversation between two grown-up versions of herself … As heavy as it sounds, the pair make wonderful company – insightful, warm, funny … a heartbreakingly honest rendering of both the process and the story.’

—The Guardian

‘Mikosza’s restraint and control in writing herself like this, her awareness and self compassion, are remarkable. This is an emotionally moving work that also pushes memoir forward. It asks intriguing questions about what the form can do and be, at the same as it asks us what we can do and be for ourselves, how we can show up for ourselves both on and off the page.’

—The Weekend Australian

‘Janine Mikosza’s enthralling debut work of life-writing dramatises memoir’s fraught project as a dyadic conversation between selves. It is tender and tense, wry and riven … Homesickness makes something from shattered history, inventively dismantling and remaking linear memoir to do so.’

—The Saturday Paper

‘The subject has been split into two women … It’s a surprisingly nimble metafictional device for grappling with questions of disrupted identity. The form also allows Mikosza to dramatise and to openly interrogate the psychological effects of both complex trauma, and the recollection of it, in a way that resists the pitfalls of misery memoir.’

—The Age/Sydney Morning Herald

‘The transformative relationship between truth and storytelling shines through in Homesickness. Mikosza’s approach is not only brave; it is giving, and vitally important. … Mikosza’s form-bending, exploratory memoir … will undoubtedly map the way for other writers.’

—The Conversation

‘Mikosza’s skill as a fiction writer is clear here: not only does the narratorial device demarcate a protective boundary between self, character and reader, it also underscores the unreliability of human memory, particularly one that has been transmogrified by the blunt force of complex trauma.’

—Books + Publishing

‘Homesickness is a memoir that strives, as Emily Dickinson urged, to tell all the truth, but tell it slant … Janine Mikosza takes a more oblique approach to her subject and the result is a soaring view of the emotional trajectory of her life and of the philosophical questions that its telling raises. … If Homesickness calls to mind any other work, it is another deeply unconventional memoir, Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?’

—Mascara Literary Review

‘Mikosza’s distinctive approach to life writing shows up the constructedness of personal story. And, perhaps, the impossibility of knowing not only others but also oneself, in full.’

—Kill Your Darlings

BUy homesickness

Ultimo Press