What’s Home, Anyway?
“All the money in the world is never gonna/ Let you go” sings Shawn Colvin in “Cinnamon Road.”
I’m reading I Don’t Want to Talk About Home from a chapter describing the author Suad Aldarra’s experiences before she reaches Ireland (this doesn’t give anything away that the back cover doesn’t already provide). I talk about Ireland a lot, if you know me, and I’ve written about it also (Oh When The Saints). Some days, I wish one of my parents or grandparents had been born there so that my family could gain easier long-term admittance.
I’ve also raced through my studio mate’s latest novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter. I took most of a snow day and not so much as plowed but meandered through, admiring how Peter Orner’s work is constructed. Sometimes we think we know the whole story; sometimes we hopscotch around it. It’s often the way we convey the information that catches attention; it may be the only way we have—like an engine putting out at full speed and then gearing down to navigate the turns. I love this, like the dancing rhythm of most animated things if we are honest.
His birth home was Chicago. (Like the musical, like the type, like the style. The loop, the button, the periscope.)
Books and buildings are like that: changing rules, structures, expectations—like musical counterpoints to themes we couldn’t anticipate. People are like this, embodying and expressing character in spit staccato or oration ad nauseum, operas and chamber music. (How do we become who we are without these marks/markings?) Maybe several of you read “The Dead”—considered James Joyce’s most remarkable story—during this last past holiday, to give constancy and change at least its annual ceremonial moment.
Shawn Colvin has a line, “My mama had me/ But she didn’t get me” (in a song called “Tuff Kid”). I imagine many children share a similar feeling when they grow up—or before. Suad Aldarra’s parents were the kind of protective that tended to feel restrictive to the searching, world-aware, Aldarra. Situational culture, you might say, had something to do with this.
If you ever wanted to know what it’s like to grow up one way and turn out another, especially if that journey begins where customs and laws restrict your freedoms, Aldarra writes candidly about the phases. So many of us grow accustomed to our country, county, culture. Style, type, place: these all change—maybe just enough to confuse us.
Since Penguin UK published I Don’t Want To Talk About Home, my local library in Vermont ordered a copy through Inter-Library Loan. The loaning library turned out to be Liberty University. When I was a kid, home from school, I’d flip through the channels and occupy my time watching “Talk Shows.” Occasionally there were “talk shows” with a religious angle. I was interested in the performers: song and dance, singer/songwriters, anyone with a song. I judged them by their sincerity and passion. I went as far as to want to act in a soap opera that the PTL Club was creating. It wasn’t a far reach, then, to think that a newly envisioned university, Liberty, might offer a budding performer space to strut (even if the songs were predominately from a hymnal). So it was that almost fifty years later I would receive a book on loan from this very same university. Circles back. Someone, tell Randall Balmer.
“I am not OK,” the author writes at a far point. “I told this to my therapist…. That wherever I went, I felt like the odd person out in the group, to the point where I avoided groups completely.”
Aldarra writes about birth, about being parented by people who adhere to very different points of view, about relocation, cultural quandaries, inter-faith relations, a postponed wedding, civil war, having to flee, being at the mercy of strangers, trusting instincts, telling about it.
I had trouble setting Aldarra’s book aside and so I didn’t, page after page. I don’t know when a North American edition will appear, but Penguin UK isn’t too far away. The world just gets a little closer, doesn’t it? (Update: my local Norwich Bookstore was able to order a copy.)
Each, we each want to belong.
In a chapter called “Love Against War,” Suad begins, “I was never a fan of watching the news….” I compare this (a common feeling now) to seeing the news when I was younger. I suppose I had the opposite response: for I keenly wanted to know what adults did in the world—when they were teachers, preachers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, artists, soldiers, elected officials, (“you name it”)—in their roles and out of them. Rather than absorption in the news, a clinging, the author repeats the missing ingredient: “to make this ugly world a better place”—as if an insistence, the recalibration of what’s needed (another way of saying, be creative—kindly so). She writes this not for private consideration but to the public by way of a book, go figure! She comes to the book by way of the news, lived experience and societal expectation. She, like the birds of winter, may feel they have no choice but they inhabit choices (the feeder? The bush? The ground? The sky?). I Don’t Want To Talk About Home reconfirms liberation’s absolute necessity of choice.
You deserve happiness.
We deserve happiness.
A yoga teacher instructs Suad.
To be with another in their plight turns out to be universal and our adjacency is reflected in the degree to which we mourn anyone’s freedoms as potentially our own.
“I started finding pleasure…[w]henever I closed my eyes” and then: “My heart was full.”
Some liberties are close to home.
Peter Money is a poet, playwright, and author of the novel Oh When the Saints (Dublin) whose mentor was the Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg. His writing has appeared in The Irish Times, The Sun, American Poetry Review, on The Writer’s Almanac and RTE Radio 1 Ireland (“Loves: Silence and the Music of JS Bach”). Peter plays in the band Los Lorcas (their latest album Wild Island tracks are online) and his memoir about “leavings” is forthcoming in 2026.
