Books

Hannah Kent
Always Home, Always Homesick

It’s a cliché in literary studies that even the best writers rarely succeed when they stray outside their given form. The story goes that great poets make for average novelists, great novelists for average playwrights, and that in general none but a blessed few get a shot at more than one thing. There’s good reason to rethink this critical dictum when a number of contemporary writers are working confidently across multiple forms. But novelist Hannah Kent’s first foray into memoir, Always Home, Always Homesick, lends it some unfortunate proof.

The strangest thing about Always Home, Always Homesick is that it is not really – forgive me – literary. This is not a term I’d ever hoped to use to judge a book’s value, but Kent has forced my hand. I genuinely found myself wondering who this writing might be meant for. Mostly a retelling of the teenage Rotary exchange to Iceland that would later inspire her hugely successful debut novel, Burial Rites, the book has, at times, a YA feeling, as well as a trace of the kinds of self-promotion usually reserved for celebrity memoir. Kent writes about her childhood love of literature with minimal irony: “If books are magic, then there must be those who wield it. I long to be able to summon such magic.” She relates her experience of being a young Australian overseas with awkward, chummy humour: “I think of the four exchange students from my district who went to France,” she writes of eating Icelandic sviðasulta (sheep’s head jam). “Arseholes.”

Even worse, if you don’t know who multi-award-winning novelist Hannah Kent is, don’t worry – she tells you. We learn that “Burial Rites is acquired simultaneously in Australia/New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America after a series of bidding wars”; that she and her university friends were “of a similar ilk: talented, quirky, in love with books”. This is the peculiar agony of bad memoir – it can feel a little like talking to someone who is un-self-aware. Again and again, Kent applies zero pressure to the story she wants to tell about herself: first she is an empathic, bookish child, then she is an intrepid and passionate young writer in love with “the vast and exquisite beauty of the world”.

Both these things might well have been true: the question is why anyone would want to read about them. I’ve loved Kent’s novels, but her desire to consecrate, to vindicate – to tell us a beautiful tale – is better suited to fiction than she knows.

Picador Australia, 352pp, $36.99 (hardback)

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 31, 2025 as "Always Home, Always Homesick".

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