Memoirs

 I was very fortunate to present with Dr. Jessica Sanfilippo-Schulz in a talk for the World Food Programme's Family Liaison Outreach Community (FLOCK).  Our work was on TCK and CCK memoirs.

Here are some of the books I spoke about and some I would have spoken about if I had had more time:

I started with Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands (1981), which is essays not memoir per se.  The titular essay, "Imaginary Homelands" has some lovely lines about geographic and temporal distance meaning that what is remembered as "home" is actually fictional.  Rushdie is not strictly TCK, though definitely multiply displaced (India, Pakistan, The UK, years in hiding from the fatwa, the United States).

I paired him with Michael Ondaatje's family history Running in the Family (1982)--for Ondaatje, trying to piece memories together requires collaboration.  Ondaatje is TCK (former Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, UK, Canada).

Akwaeke Emezi's memoir Dear Senthuran (2021) considers the result of multiple moves (nothing and no one seems real after a while).  Here (as in their autobiographical novel Freshwater), Emezi is interested in the psychology of ogbanje.  Their work makes me feel as though my brain is melting . . . a good thing in small doses.  Emezi is Malaysian/ Sri Lankan/Nigerian/ American.

Jane Alison's 2009 memoir is . . . astonishing.  It concerns an American and an Australian diplomatic family in which there is a partner (for Alison, a parent) swap.  Alison is Australian/American and her bio sometimes refers to her as "raised in the foreign service" which is interesting shorthand for a TCK upbringing.

Heidi Sand-Hart's Home Keeps Moving (2010) is a memoir of being raised a missionary kid in England, India and Norway.  She explicitly engages with TCK vocabulary, unlike the other authors I mention.  She is also the only one of the authors I have mentioned so far who is not also a successful novelist.  It shows in the prose style, which is more rawly confessional.

I threw in some novels too, because of how they catch autobiographical detail.  Yann Martel's The High Mountains of Portugal (2016) which I found peripatetically charming, and which features a mis- matched relationship between a chimpanzee and an Iberian rhinoceros.  I have written about this before.

I have written about Ondaatje's The Cat's Table academically.  I used it in the FLOCK talk because details about the Oronsay, and the protagonist's age when sailing alone on it from Ceylon to England are so exactly depictions of Ondaatje's own past.

I have never written on Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi.    Her work would pair very well with Yann Martel's, actually.  Call Me Zebra (2018) is rife with TCK and CCK themes.  Oloomi has other novels too.

I ended with some words from Pico Iyer (card-carrying TCK).  His Global Soul (2000) is iconic in writing about travel and dislocation.  

And finally, Aminatta Forna's The Devil that Danced on Water (2002).  I suspect her very recent The Window Seat would have excellent material too.

Ideally, especially for the World Food Programme audience, I would have liked to consider a couple of TCK travel narratives, perhaps jumping off from the award winning blogs listed on this site and my own work from years ago on that topic.  Something I have yet to investigate is TCKs in international aid writing memoirs.  I know those must exist, but haven't put the work into hunting them down yet.  I can recommend non-TCK Jessica Alexander's Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (2013) as an interesting starting point in that genre.

And what about Ottessa Moshfegh's amazing Homesick for Another World (2012).  Short stories.  Love them.  Why have I not written about them yet?

In the FLOCK talk, I plugged my own book.  Here it is:

It deals with seventeen TCK fiction writers, and has a good bibliography (c. 2013).

Gerald Durrell My Family and Other Animals was one of my favorite books when I was ten.