Homelands

I'm in Belfast this weekend for a crime fiction convention, and it feels a lot like home to me. That's not Irish-American sentimentality, although at least one of my ancestors left from here. It's about being among a group of people I am glad to see, who are glad to see me. It's about taking common delight in something separate from us and sharing the human magic of storytelling.

I never know what to say when people ask me where I'm from. I was born in New Rochelle, New York, a place I never lived; my mother was staying with her parents in Larchmont while my father (our father, since I'm a twin) was in the South China Sea. But she wasn't from Larchmont, and neither were her parents. They were from Charleston, living the peripatetic life of a corporate lawyer. My mother had been born at Georgetown University Hospital, when my grandfather was an attorney with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

Anyway, before my eighth birthday I had lived in Larchmont; in Coronado, California; in Norfolk, Virginia; in the Bronx; in Fairfax, Virginia; and in Virginia Beach, where I stayed until I was sixteen. From that point until my mid-thirties I moved every year or two, simply because that felt normal.

I say all the time that the universal human condition is homesickness. That's obviously based on my own experience, but I suspect most people just don't realize that's the name for what they feel. Even people who have lived in the same place all their lives feel it, and why is that?

It's because we were somewhere before we were here. At a minimum, we were in the salt sea of our mothers' wombs. If you believe in a world beside this one, that's where we were before that. Some piece of us remembers that, I think — or almost remembers that, and that almost is the longing for the home we can't name.

We want to believe that we have come from somewhere, that we are going somewhere, and that mysteries have solutions. This is why we have religions. This is why we have crime fiction.