Ebook: Ways to Come Home

“I began to notice how everything out there, in the wild, seemed to move. Oceans. Sharks. Wolves. Elephants. Rivers. Nothing stayed in the same place. I wanted to be like them too, and the only way to do this was to keep moving.” So begins Ways to Come Home, a personal memoir in which contemporary Australian writer Kate Mathieson reflects on the lives we have marked for ourselves – school, university, careers, marriages, mortgages, children, school – and the other life, that one that calls to us from dreams, and out of books, that suggests the life we are living, may not be ours. Stuck in a life that isn’t wild at all, with nothing to show except a well-adorned house and too many business suits, Kate uses books to vanish from her life. She finds solace in Thoreau and Yeats and Keats, until an old copy of Sylvia Plaths The Bell Jar finds her, whose work she begins to realise, sharply reflects her own life. Plaths’ Esther Greenwood – “slipped easily into a strange and eerie depression. She thought about dying. She kept friends and went out. She pretended to be fine, but she wasn’t… The Esther with too many figs haunted me. I sounded like her. Or she sounded like me. There I was, fifty years after Plath wrote her novel, standing in my living room, having exactly the same thoughts as Esther. All those figs. And yet the only thing I could smell was the bell jar descending upon me as I begun to stew on the sour juices of myself.” Ways to Come Home follows Kate as she contemplates the pleasure of letting go and accepting the invitation from her heart to leave the life she has shaped, and be led, instead, by her infinite curiosity for wandering across the world. Thus begins an elemental journey across Africa, weaving through unchartered lands and sacred places, under skies and stars, through forests and deserts. Kate encourages all of us to be bold, and keep moving, to give sound to the voice within us - urging us to dare to be ourselves, no matter how we may be perceived as a result. Shortlisted for the 2016 Finch Memoir Prize, Ways to Come Home, is a tale of exile and community, isolation and family, wildness and memory, nature and passion. And what it means, to find our way, back home.