Translator and writer Jennifer Croft on her extraordinary childhood and the places it's led her 

Jennifer Croft is best known as the translator of Nobel Prize-winning Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. In 2018, they shared the Man Booker International Prize for Croft's translation of Tokarczuk's novel Flights.

Now, in her new memoir, Homesick, Croft tells her own story. Through vignettes and evocative photographs, it charts her unconventional upbringing in Oklahoma: home-schooling with her younger sister, who was ill from an early age; pursuing her precocious passion for mathematics and the Russian language; and going off to university on a full scholarship at 15. The darkness in her story — trauma and depression — is balanced by the excitement of self-discovery, through language, photography and travel.

Poignant and lyrical, Homesick has been widely praised as a unique coming-of-age story. 

Croft spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from her home in Los Angeles.

Pervasive malaise

"[The dark undercurrent in Homesick] ultimately comes from the depression from which my mother was suffering when we were children. I felt it was important to highlight the ways in which there was always a sense of illness in our family household.

I felt it was important to highlight the ways in which there was always a sense of illness in our family household.

"The title of Homesick refers, of course, to nostalgia but also to this pervasive malaise. This kind of lingering bad feeling that was always present when I was growing up.

"When my sister actually did get diagnosed with a brain tumour when she was five, suddenly all of my mom's premonitions came true. That reinforced her sense that the world was imploding and had real repercussions in both of our lives."

Stigma and struggle

"My sister and I weren't aware of depression. Mental health care in Oklahoma in the 1980s and 1990s was pretty deplorable, from what I saw or didn't see.

When my sister actually did get diagnosed with a brain tumour when she was five, suddenly all of my mom's premonitions came true.

There was so much stigma around going to get therapy or anything like that. But my mother had a lot of substance abuse in her family and a lot of mental illness.  

"She was the one person in her family who would strive to be a good student and good at her job. I think she was somewhat thwarted in the latter efforts by the fact of having me when she was only 21 years old.

Life in pictures

"I had a Polaroid camera when I was five or six. It was amazing. I could make something and just spit it right out. It was instant gratification. I didn't have too many possessions back then. The Polaroid camera multiplied the objects and the people in my life in a way that I found totally thrilling. It was also a way of freezing that proliferation of objects and people in a way that I found really soothing. It met all of my childhood needs at once.  

"Then when I became a teenager and I became so terribly shy, I saved up all my money for years and bought a Canon SLR camera. I was still using film back then. It became a protective layer between me and other people.

The Polaroid camera multiplied the objects and the people in my life in a way that I found totally thrilling.

"If we went to any kind of event, I would always bring my camera. I would have it positioned in-between either my face or my chest. It gave me a sense of safety. People didn't talk to me in the same way — no one approached me if I was actively taking photographs. I found that to be a really wonderful benefit of having the camera.

"Psychologically, it became a kind of tool to avoid connection, any real connection. It was a substitute for actually getting to know people — getting to know their desires and their ideas, which frightened me too much at the time.

"It definitely went through many different iterations — photography in my life — and I rediscovered the joyful part of photography, of seeking out beautiful shapes and beautiful colours and beautiful coincidences and images and all kinds of things when I started writing this book. 

"I realized that I wanted to include photographs in it." 

Saved by translation

"Translation proved a very exciting alternative to photography, which I'd had a diminishing interest in for a while. It was an exciting new approach to writing. I always thought of translation as a kind of apprenticeship in writing. I had always been very interested in women's writing in particular. I discovered all of these really cool, young women writers.  

"Also, I was translating Olga Tokarczuk and I was just feeling like I was learning so much. I was so active in meeting some of these writers and just seeing this whole new panorama of things that art and literature could do. I felt suddenly like I was a part of that for the first time ever. The process of translation itself, which is so dynamic, became something that really engaged me intellectually.

I always thought of translation as a kind of apprenticeship in writing. I had always been very interested in women's writing in particular.

"I've been working with Tokarczuk the longest. It's gotten to the point where I sense that I can predict the endings of her sentences as I'm reading. She most recently published a collection of short stories and I was so excited when she sent them to me and so excited as I was reading them. And at the same time I also knew what was going to happen and what everyone was going to say. 

"There's something so intimate — and that may just be an illusion — but it's that feeling of being inside someone else's brain, someone whom you really admire."

Jennifer Croft's comments have been edited for length and clarity.