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.