Home Bound
An Uprooted Daughter's Reflections on Belonging
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"This moving book is both an act of defiance — a way to construct a home outside of borders — and a timely manifesto on the need for more equitable housing policy in America, weaving her scholarship in economic justice together with her firsthand experience of the many places she’s lived. “Home Bound” is not just a resonant personal history, but also a thoroughly researched investigation of home."
—Rajpreet Heir, The New York Times Book Review
"Readers of Home Bound will likely experience that pleasant rush of recognizing something personal in someone else’s reality, of answering, yes, home feels like this to me, too."
—Chicago Review of Books
"Bee’s lyrical, emotive prose takes readers through her life with an intimacy that draws and keeps them close. . . . [Home Bound will] appeal to a variety of reader, challenging singular beliefs of what it means to be a daughter, sister, lover, wife, lawyer, and mother."
—Library Journal, starred review
In this singular and intimate memoir of identity and discovery, Vanessa A. Bee explores the way we define “home” and “belonging” — from her birth in Yaoundé, Cameroon, to her adoption by her aunt and her aunt’s white French husband, to experiencing housing insecurity in Europe and her eventual immigration to the US. After her parents’ divorce, Vanessa traveled with her mother to Lyon and later to London, eventually settling in Reno, Nevada, as a teenager, right around the financial crisis and the collapse of the housing market. At twenty, still a practicing evangelical Christian and newly married, Vanessa applied to and was accepted by Harvard Law School, where she was one of the youngest members of her class. There, she forged a new belief system, divorced her husband, left the church, and, inspired by her tumultuous childhood, pursued a career in economic justice upon graduation.
Vanessa’s adoptive, multiracial, multilingual, multinational, and transcontinental upbringing has caused her to grapple for years with foundational questions such as: What is home? Is it the country we’re born in, the body we possess, or the name we were given and that identifies us? Is it the house we remember most fondly, the social status assigned to us, or the ideology we forge? What defines us and makes us uniquely who we are?
Organized unconventionally around her own dictionary-style definitions of the word “home,” Vanessa tackles these timeless questions thematically and unpacks the many layers that contribute to and condition our understanding of ourselves and of our place in the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bee, a consumer-protection lawyer and essayist, traces her diffuse family tree in this tender and captivating exploration of the meaning of home. Born in 1988 Cameroon and adopted by her aunt (referred to throughout as "mom") soon after, the author is the only one of her father's children to carry his last name, despite being estranged from him since birth. In vivid recreated diary entries, Bee recounts her move with her mother to Lyon, France, in the early 1990s, the racialized volatility that rocked their housing complex, and their subsequent move to London, where, for a time, they were homeless. Bee moved to Nevada at age 13 to be nearer relatives, as described in a chapter of urgent numbered fragments that follows Bee through American high school, early socioeconomic reckonings, evangelical Christianity, and her marriage at age 19. After graduating from Harvard Law and getting a divorce, Bee confronted what it means to exist within American racial dynamics: "I was not African American, but lived under blackness in this country." Rather than let displacement define her, though, Bee draws strength and insight from her adversities. Of her name, she writes, "If I am to never feel completely at home in it, then I must make a new home of it." What emerges is a rich and enthralling story of finding oneself outside of the bounds of borders and beliefs. This offers radiant hope in the face of darkness.