Author of Two Daughters Alison Edwards writes a piece for us about the idea of home.
I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, but I was born and raised on the south coast of New South Wales. I moved to Sydney for university, but only spent a few years there before leaving for an exchange program in Germany, and have lived in Europe pretty much ever since. Almost all my adult life—half my life so far!—has been in Europe. My accent has become warped enough that other Aussies tend to ask me where I’m from.
I have a Dutch husband and two children with Dutch names that my family find unpronounceable. I speak Dutch and am a naturalised Dutch citizen. But it would be a stretch to say I am Dutch—or maybe a little part of me is. I like to think I have a bit of German in me too, after spending years studying the language and culture, but I’m more of a fangirl (yep, weirdo!) than a proper German. I also have a British passport: both my parents are from Yorkshire, and I used to get teased at school for saying vitamin and yoghurt with short vowels. Still, during the four years I lived in Cambridge, no Brit would have mistaken me for one of their own.
So home is wherever I am at the time, and in the bits and pieces of each place that I take with me. In that sense I’m a magpie, a kind of collector of languages and cultures. And yet! Working on a novel with an Australian protagonist has made me feel more connected to Australia than I have in years. It’s not just the superficial things, like space and sun and beaches and that Sydney sparkle. It’s something about the national mythology of mateship and the idea that everyone is totally chilled out yet also somehow pioneering. You’re the Voice and the Qantas theme song are guaranteed to set me off (pathetic, I know). So is anything by Missy Higgins.
Two Daughters has two point-of-view characters: Ava, from the south coast, and Laurie, from Cambridge. I know both places well and loved having two settings that clash in many ways: a relatively remote place that struggles with brain drain versus a hub of global academia. My new novel, too, takes place in different countries. That feels unavoidable to me. Because I’m such a mix myself, I worry that I can’t pull off a character or a plot steeped in one location only. Besides, I enjoy exploring themes like identity and belonging and freedom, and being geographically untethered lends itself to that.
Ava and Laurie share an ambivalence I think many people feel about ‘home’. The desire to feel as if you belong somewhere, and at the same time the desire to break free. Wanting to be known, but sometimes wanting to be anonymous. Wanting a sense of homeliness, but simultaneously suffocating in it. And both of them eventually come to appreciate a sense of groundedness or rootedness, whether that connection is to a place or a person. It’s funny that I haven’t come full circle that way in my own life, geographically speaking at least. Or maybe my story just isn’t finished yet!
Two Daughters
by Alison Edwards
A brilliant debut reaching from the picturesque South Coast of NSW to the cloisters of Cambridge, following two young women's lives as they become entwined in ways neither could have expected.
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