Meredith Appleyard explores the meaning of home in her new novel: When Grace Went Away
What is home? And how do we know when we’ve found it? Meredith Appleyard drew on her own nomadic experiences to explore these issues in her new novel.
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What is home? And how do we know when we’ve found it? MEREDITH APPLEYARD drew on her own nomadic experiences to explore these issues in her new novel.
When Grace Went Away is a story about coming home.
It begins in Miners Ridge, a small country town where, over forty years earlier, city girl Sarah and her farmer husband settled into married life. Sarah had no idea of the complexities of life on the land, but through grit and determination she made a home, raised a family, and supported her husband with the farm work.
Then, when it seemed that all the children were settled in their adult lives, tragedy fractured the family, sending them spinning away from each other. Grace, the eldest sibling, who has made a life and a career in the city, tries desperately to keep the family in touch with each other.
But the tragedy has dislocated them all from this place they once knew as home.
What is home? And how do we know when the place where we are is home?
As I wrote this book, the characters of Grace and Sarah helped me explore these questions. During my own childhood my family moved often. I don’t remember the first time, but I have memories of the many times after that. I carried the practice on into adulthood. I’ve moved across states and across the world. I’ve lived in a donga in the desert, in nurses’ quarters, in public housing, and in a caravan. With my husband I’ve owned a one-hundred-year-old farmhouse, and built two new houses.
In all of these moves, only once did I feel homesick: when I lived and worked in London.
It was an amazing adventure, and as a twenty-one-year-old, a rite of passage to adulthood. But I remember vividly the visceral yearning for my home in South Australia, a place of familiar things, of family and friends.
I took Grace to London so I could explore those intense and conflicting feelings we call homesickness. What starts off for her as the adventure of a lifetime morphs into something quite different.
She constantly thinks about all she’s left behind and she frets about what’s happening to her family while she’s away. No one is more surprised than Grace when she finds herself yearning for the place of her birth.
Grace contemplates Miners Ridge afresh, through the eyes of the woman she’s become, not who she was when she first left, or the daughter and sibling who visited out of duty and the need to maintain a connection.
Back in Australia, her marriage in tatters, Sarah finds herself alone and adrift in Adelaide, the city of her birth, the place she once called home.
She realises that with Grace gone the other people she cares about the most in the world are in Miners Ridge. She pushes aside the ghosts of the past and returns, slowly piecing together a new home and life for herself there.
Home, as the two women find, is such a complicated thing. It’s so much more than a building in a physical place. What makes a place home for one person can be so different for another.
I remember the first time I returned to the place where I was born and spent my early childhood. It had been many years since I left, and while there was a familiarity about it, I felt no sense of connectedness.
I’m not sure what I expected but I didn’t feel at all as if I’d come home. By then family and friends had long ago moved on and my grandparents were in the cemetery. It had become just another town on the way to some place else.
But going back there made me realise how much I love where I live now. It’s home. Every time I leave, even if it’s only a day trip to the city, coming back is a joy. The people I love the most in the world are there. And it’s where my dog lives!
For Grace and her mother Sarah, home turns out to be about much more than the place where they live. It’s about the people they love and care about. But before each of them can reach that place of understanding, there are fractured relationships they must attend to.
I’ve been luckier than Grace and Sarah. The path to finding my own cherished place in the world has been less fraught than theirs. But we all made it in the end.
AT HOME WITH A GOOD BOOK … OR TWO
When Grace Went Away, by Meredith Appleyard and published by HarperCollins Australia, is out now. For another option, our Book of the Month is Darry Fraser’s Elsa Goody: Bushranger — yours for 30 per cent discount at Booktopia with the special Sunday Book Club code BUSHRANGER.
And remember you are always welcome at the Sunday Book Club group on Facebook.
Originally published as Meredith Appleyard explores the meaning of home in her new novel: When Grace Went Away
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