Homecoming: A Memoir, 2021

"The purpose of 'Homecoming: A Memoir' is to explore the baffling, contradictory promises of wealth and education the suburbs of Long Island, New York offered my family. The chapters are arranged chronologically and are meant to mimic the back-and-forth travel from school to home. Some themes include grief, gender roles, and student-teacher relationships. I argue against some of the traditions I believe many Long Islanders refuse to question, like the Top Ten ranking in the first chapter and the Homecoming festivities explored in the current last two chapters. I also argue against the suburbs as a "safe" place via my depictions of the educational institution—I've seen how the unchecked corruption among officials, blatant racism among teachers, and backwards school safety policies can potentially cause long-lasting psychological damage to students and ripple outward to families and the larger community. That said, public school also offered me precious moments of refuge in the wake of my mother's death, especially in the music program and seeing the school-appointed social worker. The high-school employee was much more effective than the state-appointed social worker, who was a more hostile presence in my family due to the way the court displaced me and my two siblings for my entire junior year. I use the first-person perspective and avoid long-winded reflections, keeping close to the teenage narrator in order to speak to the immediacy of the narrative's stressors. For years the silence that an alcoholic family brings kept me silent, but now I hope to provide a more nuanced view of my generation and the problems students are facing in the present political moment." -- Abstract