Home Bound Av Vanessa A. Bee

A cross between Memorial Drive and Crying in H-Mart, this experimental, globe-spanning memoir chronicles journalist Vanessa A. Bee's explorations of identity, family, belonging, and the meaning of home. Born in Cameroon and adopted by her aunt and her aunt's white French husband, Vanessa recounts her childhood experiences.After being uprooted time and again due to her adoptive mother's changing circumstances, she finds herself either unhoused or in public housing while in France and the UK. As a teen she immigrates to Reno, Nevada and begins to question her Catholic faith after her early marriage ends in divorce. Eventually, after graduating from Harvard Law School and navigating a career in economic justice, Vanessa makes a home for herself in Washington, DC.Vanessa's adoptive, multiracial, multilingual, multinational, and transcontinental upbringing has made her obsessed 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? Organised around dictionary-style definitions of the word"home," Bee 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.