Belonging: Home Away from Home

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

Isabel Huggan, author of such respected works as The Elizabeth Stories
and You Never Know, has led the kind of nomadic life one encounters in
the pages of popular fiction. Her early years featured deep-rooted
stability in small-town Ontario, a life she traded for adventure when
she married an international development worker. Together, they have
lived in a bustling capital city, etched out a workable relationship
with poverty in Kenya, cried tears of loneliness in the Philippines, and
restored an old farmhouse in France. Although her many travels have
given Huggan a rich tapestry of experience, they have also bestowed upon
her a complicated relationship with the concept of home. To make matters
worse, no proper translation of the word exists in the country where she
currently resides.

In Belonging, Huggan grapples with the great paradox of her adult life:
she is no longer at home when in Canada, but cannot truly call any other
place “home” either. She calls herself “a home-girl away from
home,” and Belonging charts her many reflections as she travels from
country to country.

The tales in Belonging span four continents, but the inward focus of
each memoir gives the book a psychological feel. Rather than writing
about her many homes, Huggan writes about herself as she comes to terms
with what is home. Her work does not evoke a palpable sense of place,
because Huggan’s elegant descriptive prose targets only her own
emotional state. In that sense, Belonging can perhaps best be classified
as a literary journal, although some critics have called it a literary
travelogue.

Belonging offers readers an intimate look into the inner conflicts of
one of Canada’s most highly esteemed writers. Easily her most personal
work to date, Belonging is more autobiographical than geographical and
more philosophical than practical. Fans of Huggan will undoubtedly
appreciate her revelations as if they came from a cherished friend.