Librarian and English Language Learning Instructor Janet Ross-Heiner recommends Circling Home: What I Learned from Living Elsewhere by Terry Repak.
Recently, I met Terry Repak – a fascinating and engaging woman – who I welcomed into the Wood River Museum of History and Culture. I had seen her book on a shelf at the Library, not knowing it was hers at the time. Having now read it, I invite you to experience Terry’s palpable and finely crafted memoir: Circling Home: What I Learned from Living Elsewhere (2023).
Several weeks ago, the Community Library celebrated the 17th Annual Ernest Hemingway Seminar with 150 guests for a three-day moveable feast. We vicariously traveled to Paris during the 1920s. I then realized that both Hemingway in A Moveable Feast and Repak in Circling Home are revealing the same truths …
… that place shapes us, that home is not always fixed, and that memory itself becomes a kind of home we carry with us.
Terry has been an investigative reporter, editor, research fellow, and a free-lance writer. She and her husband, a research specialist with the CDC, raised their two young children in Africa.
Circling Home explores the notion of home and how the bonds we form with people from other countries and cultures can profoundly change us. What does it mean to be home? Is it a physical place, a country, or the people we love? One comes to know oneself by moving far from home. Terry’s memoir reminds readers that wherever life is fully lived and relationships are nurtured, there is a sense of home.
Her vignettes of memoir are nuanced emotionally, layered, and rooted in cross-cultural life and memory.
As I read Terry’s memoir, my memories lifted from the pages, as I reminisced of living and working abroad as an expat with a young child. Experiences of language barriers, fear, illness, coup d état and war were realities faced—and at the same time one also develops navigation, resilience, and adaptation in a new culture.
In the closing chapter of Circling Home, Terry redefines home as a practice rather than a single place. Years of living in Africa, Europe, and the U.S. shaped her family’s routines, friendships, and sense of belonging wherever they were. Returning home meant carrying fragments of each place into the present. I appreciated and enjoyed the book Circling Home and hope you can travel and reflect through your moment in time, too.
