Returning Home
I love a wise and nostalgic narrator.
As I creep closer to forty, my goal is to become one myself. All of my favorite novels feature a narrator looking back. These characters are a bit weathered from life experience. And with this wisdom, they’ve grasped the full picture.
Having distance from an event can do two things: it can make the picture blurry. Or, if we’re lucky, it can bring clarity and help us connect the dots, providing a new perspective.
When I was twenty-three years old, I wanted to go home. I’d been living in Brooklyn, and I was tired. In New York, I couldn’t quite turn the proverbial key all the way, the lock stuck, and I was unable to make a life for myself.
And so, I told one of my favorite colleagues at the time, I’m just ready to go home.
You’re lucky you have a place like that, she’d responded. I’d love a place where I could return and feel truly at home. Like I belonged. No place like that really exists for me.
I didn’t ask what she meant; I was only twenty-three. It didn’t feel right to pry. But today, if the same conversation took place, I would have asked a few follow-ups.
This little story, me wanting to return home in my twenties, reminds me yet again why I love a nostalgic narrator.
I have an innate pull and desire to look back. To relive moments from my younger years when I felt a sense of wonder and freedom. But, when we’re out on the city streets dodging bicycle messengers, we don’t know how the story will end! How comforting, though, to start at the end. To experience it all, knowing we will be able to return home.
As a nostalgic person, it’s not shocking that I am drawn to a nostalgic narrator. These character narrators have deeply personal ties to their subject matter and the lived experience to look back and see the shape of it all, as if from the air.
Here are some of my favorites…
The Last Summer on State Street by Toya Wolfe. This one is just a completely underrated Chicago story, written by a woman who grew up in the now-demolished Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago’s South Side. It explores friendship between three young girls on the precipice of innocence lost.
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue, which don’t judge me, I guess was nominated for something called the TicTok book award… who knew?? But anyway, it’s about a really high-drama friendship between two twenty-somethings, with a Cork, Ireland setting. (Have I mentioned my obsession with Irish literature and films?)
Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance by Alison Espach. I almost forgot about this one, but then I saw it on my mom’s bookshelf. After the death of her sister, this narrator struggles through grief to figure out how to survive.
And last, but not least, (hint-hint this one is my favorite) Writers & Lovers by my all time favorite author, Lily King. This book will break you down and build you back up in all the most beautiful ways. How does she do it, folks?
Each of these novels contains a first person narrator (the narrator is a character in the story), who is looking back on their life. And we, as readers, are comforted to know they’ve made it past whatever curveballs life has thrown—they’re speaking from the other side. And look, there is even a book to prove it.
As I’ve mentioned, I started writing a “book” of my own.
I read it over recently and hated it so much that I slammed my laptop closed and decided to quit writing forever, again. BUT THEN, I took a deep dive into my psyche, asking the tough questions like, why do you hate this story so much? And I realized, partially my problem was I writing in third person. Why would I, a person who adores a first person narrator, not at least attempt to write something with a nostalgic narrator of my own?
Well friends, with that, I’ve started the process of rewriting and retelling. So I guess, what I’m trying to say is that my baby-book will live to see another day.
