‘I didn’t want to make public my suffering’: Janine Mikosza on reinventing the trauma memoir

Janine Mikosza revisited the 14 houses she lived in before she was 18. Her resulting memoir Homesickness is out now. Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi

It’s a profoundly strange experience to interview Janine Mikosza immediately after reading her debut, Homesickness.

The book is a meditation on the nature of memory, truth and reckoning with past trauma – and it’s presented as one long conversation in which she interrogates herself.