What do you think?
Rate this book
In Place
This Way Back
“Winning and contemplative.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Going back to her ancestral homeland, a Greek American girl discovers she is a lesbian in love with God, so her questions about home and belonging will not be easily answered.
This Way Back dramatizes a childhood split between Queens, New York, and Cyprus, an island nation with a long colonial history and a culture to which Joanna Eleftheriou could never quite adjust. The book avows a Greek-Cypriot-American lesbian’s existence by documenting its scenes: reenacting an 1829 mass suicide by jumping off a school stage onto gym mats at St. Nicholas, harvesting carobs on ancestral land, purchasing UNESCO-protected lace, marching in the island’s first gay pride parade, visiting Cyprus’s occupied north against a dying father’s wish, and pruning geraniums, cypress trees, and jasmine after her father grew too weak to lift the shears. While the author’s life binds the essays in This Way Back into what reads like a memoir, the book questions memoir’s conventional boundaries between the individual and her community, and between political and personal loss, the human and the environment, and the living and the dead.
Going back to her ancestral homeland, a Greek American girl discovers she is a lesbian in love with God, so her questions about home and belonging will not be easily answered.
This Way Back dramatizes a childhood split between Queens, New York, and Cyprus, an island nation with a long colonial history and a culture to which Joanna Eleftheriou could never quite adjust. The book avows a Greek-Cypriot-American lesbian’s existence by documenting its scenes: reenacting an 1829 mass suicide by jumping off a school stage onto gym mats at St. Nicholas, harvesting carobs on ancestral land, purchasing UNESCO-protected lace, marching in the island’s first gay pride parade, visiting Cyprus’s occupied north against a dying father’s wish, and pruning geraniums, cypress trees, and jasmine after her father grew too weak to lift the shears. While the author’s life binds the essays in This Way Back into what reads like a memoir, the book questions memoir’s conventional boundaries between the individual and her community, and between political and personal loss, the human and the environment, and the living and the dead.
264 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 2020
5 people are currently reading
110 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
May 26, 2021
Through 17 biographical sketches, Joanna Eleftheriou creates a collective portrait of her experiences, a memoir. Stories of diaspora, and family connections are sprinkled throughout the collection. A student of Greek and English and an academic, the author takes us to New York, Agata in Cyprus, Albania, Northern Greece and vicinity to meet her family and friends.
Close to her father, she identifies with his desire to be bicultural, bilingual, educated. When she later writes about his return to his native Cyprus and his death, she mourns his loss, his life choices of relocating the family to the US; she describes Greek burial customs, like preparing koliva and candle lighting an aspect of her writing I especially appreciate as I am a native of Greece and a visitor to Cyprus.
During summer teaching sessions of Americans on the Greek island of Thasos she delves into explaining hospitality, parea, and other concepts germane to local cultures. She adores Greek music, the only kind she listens to; she loves Greek dances and teaches them to the participants.
The author values her independence, seeks freedom, and self-determination. Acknowledging her gay nature is in conflict with her own strong religious beliefs and the orthodox religion’s condemnation of homosexuality. With time she reconciles with her nature, but when she discloses it to her mother, she unfortunately encounters rejection.
Themes of splitting run through the collection: two languages, two continents, at least two cultures and the tag of being a lesbian among the faithful orthodox people. It is a beautifully written, courageous and honest collection of essays, a must read for bicultural readers.
Close to her father, she identifies with his desire to be bicultural, bilingual, educated. When she later writes about his return to his native Cyprus and his death, she mourns his loss, his life choices of relocating the family to the US; she describes Greek burial customs, like preparing koliva and candle lighting an aspect of her writing I especially appreciate as I am a native of Greece and a visitor to Cyprus.
During summer teaching sessions of Americans on the Greek island of Thasos she delves into explaining hospitality, parea, and other concepts germane to local cultures. She adores Greek music, the only kind she listens to; she loves Greek dances and teaches them to the participants.
The author values her independence, seeks freedom, and self-determination. Acknowledging her gay nature is in conflict with her own strong religious beliefs and the orthodox religion’s condemnation of homosexuality. With time she reconciles with her nature, but when she discloses it to her mother, she unfortunately encounters rejection.
Themes of splitting run through the collection: two languages, two continents, at least two cultures and the tag of being a lesbian among the faithful orthodox people. It is a beautifully written, courageous and honest collection of essays, a must read for bicultural readers.
September 1, 2020
This book made me want to go to Greece! Fascinating account of growing up between cultures & of grappling with queer identity in an orthodox family.
November 3, 2020
These gorgeous essays chart the liminal spaces of a life. Caught between identities--American and Cypriot, Christian and lesbian, dutiful daughter and fully independent adult--Joanna Eleftheriou takes us on a journey that crosses seas while she tries to reconcile these identities. We learn not only the history of a family, but the history of an occupied island nation. We plumb the limits of language as well as culture, as Joanna recalls the painful process of learning Greek as a middle and high school student and later teaches her own American writing students Greek dances. At the heart of the collection is Joanna's relationship to her family, particularly her father, whose death we learn about in the first essay, "The Rope of Desires." As we weave through time, we meet him through both Joanna's recollections and his journal entries he leaves behind. After his death, as Joanna comes out to everyone else in her life, she must face the possible rejection of coming out to her religious mother. Other standout essays include "Your Schedule Depends on the Sky," "Ithacas," "Wild Honey, Locust Beans," "Unsent Letter to my Father," and "Without Goodbyes." I love that the collection ends with "Moonlight Elegy," with Joanna's father alive, putting around the house in the middle of the night, pointing out the beauty of the moon to his daughter and to us. What a perfect bookend to the first essay in a collection that leads us back into history and memory and in the meantime teaches us something about what it means to be human in the present.
January 26, 2021
A joy to read this book. Between an exploration of the fascination with manual labor and discussing nuances of greek words, many topics get covered. From the carob beans, to identity reflections a page turner. Masterfully weaves in the politics of Cyprus so smoothly the reader wonders why can't all politics be discussed like in this book.
February 4, 2021
This memoir was a lovely book of essays on the author's upbringing between Cyprus and the United States, coping with the death of her father, reconciling with the church, and coming out as gay later in life. It is also rich in Cypriot history and very lyrical in language.
February 8, 2021
This book has inspired me to live a more authentic life and better embrace all aspects of my identity! That in turn has helped me to have even closer relationships with my family, and I am so grateful for this!
December 16, 2020
I wrote about this lovely book for Essay Daily: https://www.essaydaily.org/2020/12/20...
January 12, 2021
Eleftheriou writes beautifully of nostalgia, family, history and identify. Writing about her upbringing first in Queens, NY and then in her father's village in Cyprus, she takes us on her thoughtful journey of being American and Cypriot and Greek. I particularly appreciate the discourse on being both queer and Orthodox Christian. Instead of walking away from the religion that she cherished as a young girl, she becomes the only lesbian Orthodox she knows. This push pull between physical places, identity and religion (in all it's pain caused by the Church's stance on homosexuality), the loss of a loving but unhappy father who returns to a different Cyprus than the one he left, the life in academia and the life running the hills of Cyprus at night, weaves beauty and love and strength for the reader who follows eagerly page by page. I am grateful for her courage in discussing complexities of humanity, including history and diaspora. This book is not only for Greek-Americans or Cypriot-Americans, but for all humans who love, question and continue to walk on their rocky paths.
November 21, 2021
I read this book over a few days trying to savor each chapter and not wanting it to end. Eleftheriou is a very gifted writer and her experiences come to life as she crosses continents, countries and topographies. As a Greek American I could relate very well to what she experienced.
My favorite chapter was the Unsent Letter to My Father which moved me beyond words.
I have a feeling that there is more that she wants to tell us so I hope that she continues to write and there will be more books for us to enjoy.
My favorite chapter was the Unsent Letter to My Father which moved me beyond words.
I have a feeling that there is more that she wants to tell us so I hope that she continues to write and there will be more books for us to enjoy.
January 6, 2022
A bright and beautiful and book of linked essays on home, daughterhood, and identity. It is a love letter to Cyprus, and Eleftheriou's feelings are appropriately fervid and complicated and tender.
February 13, 2024
Had the pleasure of reading the first few chapters of This Way Back
Eleftheriou is a gentle place writer, innately eschewing cliche while acknowledging correlations and tensions between civilizations, biological and chosen families, her homelands (NYC, Cyprus), the untidy binary between, among other things, the occupationists and the occupied. Most refreshing are the author's strength in vulnerability, detailing a lesbian life that is more learned that kinetically carnal (yearnings notwithstanding); one where learning to live in the present is, in lands ruled by Olympian deities and those ruled by the blinking cursor of the scribe.
Eleftheriou is a gentle place writer, innately eschewing cliche while acknowledging correlations and tensions between civilizations, biological and chosen families, her homelands (NYC, Cyprus), the untidy binary between, among other things, the occupationists and the occupied. Most refreshing are the author's strength in vulnerability, detailing a lesbian life that is more learned that kinetically carnal (yearnings notwithstanding); one where learning to live in the present is, in lands ruled by Olympian deities and those ruled by the blinking cursor of the scribe.
September 1, 2024
This goes deep.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews