Perhaps to assuage her guilt, Amy clings tighter to Zoe in adolescence than in childhood. She's uncomfortable outstripping her little sister intellectually verbal though she is, she begins wishing "we could be octopuses, so we would not need words." Even in adulthood, living on a different continent from Zoe, she thinks longingly of summer-camp Red Rover games, when "we used to be the perfect team and nobody could even dream of tearing us apart." Amy dislikes hitting puberty and experiencing sexuality before Zoe does. After Zoe enters remission, Amy extends that guilt to her own swifter progress through the world - which, because she's three years older, is unstoppable. Amy suffers intense guilt over her sister's illness. The book carries a sense of nausea at the sisters' separation, though they are, by any sibling standards, uncommonly close. The sensation of drifting is crucial to Homesick.
What I could never understand, since we were sisters, was how some little tiny stars could misalign in your brain, and not in mine, and just like that instead of being part of me all of a sudden you began to drift away from me." I know the word comes from the same source as disaster. "I know that astrocytes are star-shaped cells. Zoe still sobs and begs the nurses not to hurt her." When Zoe undergoes surgery, Amy, as if preparing for anesthesia herself, refuses to eat. She takes pictures of Zoe's dog to use as distractions when Zoe gets her blood drawn, though "Amy can't get the timing exactly right. At first, she tries to mold Zoe in her own image, but when Zoe develops a brain tumor, Amy - tormented by guilt that she's healthy while Zoe is sick - throws herself wholly into comforting and shielding her sister.
HOMESICK BY FULL
Amy is a classically Type A older sister, assuming full responsibility for Zoe in her own mind. She's a brainy elementary-schooler at the book's start, devoted in equal measure to advanced math, her new camera, and her baby sister, Zoe. In Homesick, Croft's name is Amy, not Jennifer. Rather, Homesick is a hybrid, mixing photography and impressionistic autobiographical writing to tell the story of Croft's artistic coming of age. Neither the Spanish nor the English is a translation." "The book was written in Spanish first, as a novel called Serpientes y escaleras, and then as a memoir in English, called Homesick.
0 kommentar(er)
