I recently happened upon a startling essay written by my friend and colleague Millay Hyatt. A child of Christian missionaries who moved from Texas to Austria and then, when Millay was five, to Freiburg, Germany, she, like me, eventually settled in Berlin.

In “This World Is Not My Home,” she explores the significance of displacement, early imprinting, and a native language in the construction of a sense of belonging and of home. Millay is the author of three books, one of which, Days on the Night Train, has just been published in an English edition; several of her essays can be read in English on her website. The following conversation took place by email over the months of June, July, August, and September 2026.

—Andrea Scrima

Andrea Scrima: Millay, one of the sentences in “This World Is Not My Home” that really struck me was this: “That morning we had woken up at home. Then we had left. And were never going back. We had left behind our house, our yard. Inconceivably, they were probably still there now, without us.” This gets at the heart of the grief we feel when we’ve left the first and often only place we’ve ever belonged to—as well as that illogical relationship we have with simultaneity, with our difficulty in believing a place still exists when we’re no longer there to inhabit it. It made me think a lot about my own weird relationship to home.

I have no connection at all to Staten Island, where I grew up, but I do, occasionally, think about the house and about the fact that it’s there, this very moment, without us: that the sun is shining down on it, that the maple tree out front is casting its shadow on the pebbles separating the sidewalk from the broken asphalt. We want the places we’ve inhabited to contain some memory of the years we spent there, some residue. There is a loft in Brooklyn where I lived before my son was born that always feels like home when I’m there. Friends of mine still live in the building, a twelve-story former factory on the East River waterfront. I’m a welcome guest, and a part of my soul is imbedded in the walls and furniture—although I really didn’t live there for very long, a bit less than a year.

Millay Hyatt: I’m curious about this thing of not being connected to one’s “actual” home but a different place feeling “like home”—I take it in a positive way, but what is the blueprint for that positive notion of home if it didn’t exist before...? Know what I mean?

A.S.: There have been moments when Staten Island has suddenly felt palpable in an immaterial way—it’s usually when I’m at a family gathering with my siblings and relatives, when we’re all standing around in a kitchen talking (a remnant of the typical noncommittal sibling pose: lingering but ready to slip through the screen door at any moment). I suppose I once had a deep connection to home and then lost it, and so I guess that’s the blueprint—certainly, it’s tied to a place and a time, a familiar way of talking, and shared memories of things—but I think it has more to do with a feeling of protection; that the feeling of home is strongest with the people you feel safe with. I had this for a while in the building in Brooklyn, where friends of mine had made a business of converting the upper floors into studios, and then artists, writers, musicians, and designers moved into these raw spaces and built a community. And it always feels like coming home.

M.H.: What you describe with your community in Brooklyn sounds to me like belonging, which I would like to distinguish from home. A deciding factor in home as I understand it is the fact that we don’t and can’t choose it. It’s where we come from, it’s what shaped and made us who we are before we could respond to these influences with any sort of agency, or consciously defend ourselves against them. For many of us—probably for everyone I feel close to!—it’s what we want to get away from, because it restricts us in some way (or worse). But at the same time, we can never rid ourselves of it completely, it’s in our DNA.

And I would also like to distinguish between home as in family home and home as in hometown, home as place. My essay is about home as place, which I don’t have because of moving around so much as a child, making my family of origin and their geographically far-flung community of missionaries my only “home.” I’ve always longed for a place I could call home, a hometown. Where I no doubt wouldn’t want to live, but where I could say I was from. I fantasize that this would give me some sort of stability, some sort of foundation to depart from. When people ask you where you’re from, do you say “Staten Island”?

A.S.: I do, and the imprinting is of course still there somewhere, but the Staten Island of my childhood no longer exists. The demographic has changed; the regional accent has changed. The wooded areas we played in have long since been built over by rows and rows of identical housing, and so there’s nothing to go back to, nothing to activate that imprinting. In cities like New York, things change so rapidly, and so fundamentally, that the places that once made up your world—the markers of your memory—disappear. And so it’s not so much the feeling that you don’t recognize your own hometown; it’s more that your hometown doesn’t recognize you. My relationship to home is tied to my siblings and friends; apart from that, there is no sense of belonging or even of having once belonged there. What’s remained is the way my body instantly recognizes the ocean air and weather patterns, the stark, clear light—and so I can imagine a feeling of home more closely tied to landscape than to people, but the city of New York is too dominant a presence for that to prevail in any way. When my mother passed away some years ago, former neighbors of ours came to the funeral, retired schoolteachers who once lived across the street from us. I used to babysit their kids. For a moment, that sense of small-town “home” you allude to was restored, of having once belonged to a place that felt stable and safe: called back to life by our fragile, temporary constellation. And then it was gone again.

There’s a sentence in your essay that describes your own early blueprint: “The moment, however, I arrived in the only place that could have become something like a hometown for me—Freiburg—I was no longer merely preoccupied with my own foggy inner life, with my body, with the things in my immediate surroundings that gave me pleasure and fear and occasion to play, but had already woken up to a world of cultural differences. … I was never unconscious enough in it for it to permeate me and make me.” This is a very different story: in my case, my imprinting no longer has a place to bring it back to life; in yours, the imprinting never took place, or not in the same way. Do you think this affects the way in which you’ve inhabited other places that have become home for many years, like Berlin?

M.H.: Hard to say because I don’t know what it’s like for people with a childhood imprinting of place to move somewhere new. Maybe I had less shedding to do than many people who urgently want to rid themselves of their imprintings, like my Austrian boyfriend who trained himself to not sound Austrian when he moved to Berlin as a young man. I came here as a young woman shaped by many places, but none of them with a firm enough hold on me for me to have to actively shake that hold so that I could become part of this place. My identity was strongly rooted in the relationships with other missionary kids I grew up with, it was in fact one of those friendships that brought me to Berlin. We talk a lot about not having hometowns but having each other. Which is not so dissimilar to what you’re saying. The point about the Staten Island you grew up in no longer existing is really interesting. The dictum that you can never go home again being true not only because you’ve changed, but because the place has changed. Which is true for some places more than others, and in some periods of history more than others, perhaps. It makes me think of how people don’t consider the last couple generations of Berliners, who were born and raised here, to be as authentically “Berliners” as earlier generations because they don’t speak in the traditional dialect. Of course, this is also a question of class, and truer for kids growing up in more “cosmopolitan” neighborhoods or going to schools populated by children of the mobile than it is for kids in neighborhoods with less privilege and less mobility. Which in turn makes me think of David Goodhart’s thesis about the Anywheres and the Somewheres, the former being the urban, mobile, liberal elites who value diversity and aren’t tied to a particular place in the way that Somewheres are, who are resistant to change and value continuity, tradition. It would almost seem as if Somewheres, by definition, have a stronger sense of home as place. Certainly, according to Goodhart, they are more resentful of changes in the places they call home, or are at least susceptible to xenophobic, racist explanations for why these changes are taking place. But underneath or behind that political instrumentalization is, I would think, the same grief you describe.

A.S.: It’s also interesting when that divide runs through families—when one sibling in a family of Somewheres becomes an Anywhere. My oldest sister is strongly rooted in place: she never traveled, never spent time away, and her Staten Island speech patterns have remained pretty much intact, whereas I and another sister shed them early on. We had an aunt out West, and our grandmother took the two of us, separately, to visit when we were adolescents. We thought everything was better there—the pristine desert had none of the urban blight we’d seen each time our father drove us through the old neighborhood in the Bronx. The Southwest seemed superior in every way, and so we absorbed the accent as well—which didn’t stick for long, but diluted our native twang. I remember a class element similar to what you describe about Berlin that attached itself to the college students who’d retained their outer-borough New York accents. We weren’t Anywheres, not yet, but the groundwork was laid. It’s interesting to think about kids growing up in Berlin today—the ones from strictly German families—and then applying to some of the newer programs in the universities here, even the state universities, and discovering that the seminars take place in English—and that they’ll have to do their academic work in English. I can imagine that some of these families must resent this. Does it gradually weaken the students’ identities as Berliners, or Germans? What makes people “authentic”?

I don’t think that Anywheres necessarily have less of an emotional tie to their origins than Somewheres. We called an earlier iteration of these people “exiles.” And although there’s a big difference between disaffected émigrés and individuals forced to leave their native country and make their lives elsewhere, I still see certain similarities. Some of the voluntary exiles developed an intensely nostalgic relationship to “home” and spent the rest of their lives writing about it. One of the most famous examples being James Joyce, of course.

I’d like to come back to another quote from your essay: “If I’m from anywhere, I’m from this religion, which I have intentionally and actively turned my back on. But ‘from Christianity’ is hardly a satisfying answer to the question Where are you from? It lacks all the spatiality, the psychogeography, the everyday domesticity of the den that the animal in me longs for. This homeless animal longs to be embraced by a place as tightly as my more rooted friends, as my parents, are embraced by their places of origin.” I find this longing really interesting, and it makes me wonder if your imprinting is the itinerant identity as such—the essence of the missionary. Your latest book is centered on a walking travel experiment within a hundred miles or so of Berlin, in which you ask your host to refer you to a friend or acquaintance, who then becomes your next host, and so on. I’m struck by the ease with which you took on the role of the guest—as though it were the most natural thing of all. Is it possible that this travel practice is itself a form of home?

M.H.: My missionary upbringing meant that I was born and grew up as a guest—in different countries, in countless people’s homes. In the US, when we visited, these hosts were relatives and “supporters,” the people who donated money to the mission organization that sponsored my parents; in Europe it was fellow missionaries. I’m very, very comfortable in the homes of strangers, one of the things I’m grateful for from my upbringing, which also had a dark side, of religious abuse. But is itineracy itself a form of home? I’m not sure, at least as concerns myself. When I’m in other people’s homes, I’m a guest, they’re at home. I may feel at ease, but I’m at ease with the form, as it were, the form of being a guest. But my body, my senses and sensors, aren’t attached to this particular place. Instead, I’m an observer of other people’s attachments. I can’t really cotton to the “Home is where I hang my hat”-sentiment. Home, I would say, is where I am known—as you spoke of above. I am not known in this way in other people’s homes, in other people’s places. And I do think there’s a fundamental difference between Anywheres and exiles. The exile did not want to leave and does not celebrate mobility as such. The exile has a place to long for, to idealize, to fix in their memories until it becomes a phantasmic receptacle for all of their nostalgic fantasies and regrets. My parents did this to a degree with the US. Despite all their moving around, they are Somewheres: their childhoods were rooted to place and they are unequivocally Americans, even if their 38 years in Europe gave them a more cosmopolitan perspective.

I’m curious whether you think my notion of home as place is a fantasy.

A.S.: I’ve been wondering this as well—if your longing is for something that rarely exists, or rarely exists for long. I’m not sure. I keep getting the feeling that I should have a stronger sense of home—that I’ve maybe been careless with it in some way, or squandered it. Because exile can also be voluntary. When I was in my early twenties, I imagined myself as a refugee from Ronald Reagan’s America. And then, later, came the nostalgia you speak of—paired with a longing for the person I would have become had I never left, if that makes sense.

I believe there’s still a lot of truth in the notion that you have to physically remove yourself to gain the distance necessary to write about your origins. I certainly seem to be drawing on family and memory in all of my books—the working title of my second novel, before it became Like Lips, Like Skins, was Leaving Home. And so maybe my own blueprint has a lot to do with running away, and with trying to find home again, but in a fictional sense.

There are so many ways to lose a home. People have had the rug pulled out from under them after their countries ceased to exist—I’m thinking of East Germany, or the countries of the former Yugoslavia—people who may still be living in their childhood homes, but whose society, culture, economy, and government underwent profound and often violent change; people who found themselves ill equipped to adapt to the new realities around them.

And then, of course, language is a factor, as well. I didn’t learn German until the age of 23, but you grew up with two mother tongues. When I read this passage in your essay—“My father found German officialese hilariously pedantic and made fun of the subjunctive mood for indirect speech when he heard it on the radio [. . .].”—I wondered to what extent language itself is a kind of home.

M.H.: I grew up with two languages, but English is my only native one. I didn’t start learning German until the age of four, when we still lived in Austria. My mother tried to prepare me for kindergarten by telling me that I would be going to a place with a bunch of other kids where I would learn German. When she picked me up on my first day, I was in tears: “All the other kids already know German!” I wailed. She felt awful—but this is indicative of the insular English-language community we were living in, so airtight that I imagined Austria to be full of other English-speaking children like me. But then my German quickly became native-sounding enough that my friends at school didn’t believe me that I was American and I had to bring my passport to prove it. The fact that German is not my native language, though, surfaced for me again when I became a mother and chose to speak German with my child (his American-born and raised dad speaks English with him). The first months were awkward, as my parent-child language, my intimate home language was not, in fact, German. It took a while to feel natural. We’d thought for a while that I would switch to English when he started kindergarten and would be in a German-language environment most of the day, but by then our relationship was in German and it would have felt very unnatural and awkward to switch! My relationship with my son is at home in German, just as my relationship with my parents is at home in English, and it always feels uncomfortable to speak German with them.

So yes, language is a home that, of course, can also be lost, but you can also take it with you when you’re forced or choose to leave or when the environment around you changes drastically. It can be used to connect back, to reflect on what was left behind or to distance yourself from it. How does it feel to read your writing about the home you left in German translation? Is there a liberating distancing effect in there for you?

A.S.: Is distance inherently a positive thing? I’m not sure. I spoke about physical distance as a prerequisite for writing about home, but I believe I’m searching for the opposite of distance in my writing, if that makes sense: trying to squeeze some sense of immediacy out of language, to tap into a deeper connection beyond my own rational understanding. I co-translated my last book, and the voice and rhythms are pretty close to home, so not much distance there. But it’s different when I write in German: I find myself wrestling more, striving for precision and economy. I remember reading somewhere, I believe it was Adam Phillips in the LRB, that undergoing psychoanalysis in a language other than one’s mother tongue—even if one is entirely fluent—is a bad idea, because the analysand will always remain stuck in rationalizations and never wander into unexpected depths by accidentally tripping over a word or association rooted in the past. I believe this also applies to writing; perhaps there will always be a natural limitation to working in a language acquired after childhood.

You’re asking something else, though—what it feels like when you read (someone else’s) translation of your own words and experience the text more objectively. And if the distance that creates can be a freeing experience. For me, though, it’s more a surreal moment of recognizing my voice, but in a different body, as it were. I tend to zoom in on the inaccuracies, sentence structures that change the breath of a piece of writing, the musical rhythm of the words and the order in which a sequence of clauses gradually reveals an image—that kind of thing. It’s less a liberation than an effort to reclaim the text, or maybe the text behind the text, as my own. Because there is always something that’s buried more deeply, something that the words can’t quite get at and glance off of, and so nuance is crucial. It’s like trying to recreate that intangible “home” of the writing self; it’s a question of whether or not I can recreate my literary voice outside of English. I spent a year writing a column in German for an Austrian daily, and I really enjoyed it; I’ve just completed a long-form essay, and this, too, was a strangely satisfying experience, although the satisfaction might also have to do with the problem-solving aspect, as though it were a mathematical equation. I have deep emotional ties to German, but when I translate my German texts into English, I often feel that something is missing and wind up rewriting them. How about you—do you feel like a different writer in English? Do you translate your own work, and does that create different versions of home?

M.H.: I get the concern with trying to rescue the original text in the translation, how it’s hard to accept that nuance shifts or gets lost. I do translate myself and I find myself clinging very fiercely to my darlings in the original! But I’m wondering if there isn’t also something to be gained by surrendering to these inevitable losses, a potential freedom hidden in there? I’m thinking of a piece I wrote about my relationship with my paternal grandmother, forthcoming in a collection of short prose, which felt particularly odd to write in German, given that, unlike my parents, she doesn’t speak a word of German and was very, very American. I liked it though. The story feels like it’s about someone else, in a way, or like it’s in an American TV show dubbed into German. Given that it’s ultimately about me escaping my religious upbringing, this does feel liberating.

I don’t think home is a concept I associate with my writing. I’m not at home in my writing and I don’t aspire to be. It’s not where I’m from, it’s where I’m going. Because not having anywhere I’m from, not having a home-place, is so significant to who I am and how I live in and experience the world, my writing does frequently engage with the problem of home. But the writing itself does not thereby become home. It’s looking for one, maybe. How is it for you?

A.S.: It’s still a puzzle to me. I’ve been writing mostly in German lately, and I’m still trying to determine what this means. Sometimes it feels liberating, and sometimes it feels cumbersome, but when I want to jump into English, I often find that the words aren’t there either. In other words, language, any language, offers resistance—and so working in German can be like tackling the problem with a different tool kit.

I love the idea of comparing your text about your grandmother to an American show dubbed in German—there’s always something ludicrous about watching American actors in American settings dubbed over in a German “synchronization” that never really fits, because the voices suggest an entirely different cultural context, code of behavior, manner of expression, etc.—interspersed with the heavily accented, comical-sounding “Jack” or “Bob” or whatever. To think of a piece of writing in these terms is really interesting. Because the dubbing highlights the foreignness of the original, if that makes sense: an American show watched in Germany is something alien, only partially translatable, whereas the dubbed voices themselves are the only thing that’s culturally “authentic.”

Another line in your essay jumped out at me: “[. . .] my parents mothballed their earthly home and offered it to us, shrink-wrapped in rituals taken out of context. It was a given that we would ‘go back’ to the States after we graduated from high school.” I’m wondering if your experience was anything at all like the diaspora culture we know from the US, the problems of identity in a second-generation immigrant family—because here, too, “ethnic” customs and rituals can take on a life of their own when they’re cut off from their source.

M.H.: Yes, I think there’s a lot of overlap there, except that migrants are generally not preparing their kids for a “return” to their home country—although there are cases of that too, such as parents hoping for an end of war or systemic fragility in their home countries so that they can someday go back, and want their kids to feel at home if and when they do. It can hardly but be artificial for the kids, though. My mom actually baked a cherry pie for Lincoln’s—or was it Washington’s?—birthday. In Germany in the 1980s. Would she have done so if we were living in Ohio? Maybe, but maybe she would have been like most US women of her generation who let these hold-overs from their mothers’ generation fall by the wayside. In another country, though, it was clearly important to her to insist on these rituals—probably to soothe her own homesickness as well as to instill in us a sense of what it meant, from her perspective, to be American. My dad’s version of this was playing us Johnny Cash records—I remember that there was dissent between them about this! It was all very successful: we were very proud of being American and identified with these signifiers, taking them, and our Americanness, to be authentic, to be equivalent to what Americans in the US were like and were doing. Until, that is, we moved there, in my case when I was 18, and found ourselves utterly unprepared for life in that country in the 1990s. I had no idea what my college classmates were talking about or what the rules of their social interactions were. They weren’t celebrating Lincoln’s birthday or listening to Johnny Cash, that’s for sure. I guess the take-home (ha) is that home can’t be packaged, it can’t be inculcated. Or, to be precise, it can, in some cases, as long as the recipients of this inculcation don’t try to actually live in their parents’ home country. Many second- and third-generation immigrants in Europe or North America do identify strongly with their parents’ home country—and there are complex reasons for this, including marginalization and racism in the countries they grew up in—until they try to live there, and find themselves being much more, say, German than they thought they were and not as Turkish. As was my experience, much more German than American, as it painfully turned out.

How did you convey your Americanness to your son, whom you raised here? Did you try to give him a sense of his American “heritage”? How important was it to you that he identified with your home country—was it at all?

A.S.: I’d always spoken exclusively in English with my son, but even at the age of four, he was still responding in German, and it was a bit disconcerting. And so I suppose passing on some part of the American identity was emotionally important to me. I was planning to enroll him in an American-German bilingual school, which had a pretty elaborate entrance exam that kids had to take the year before pre-school, as crazy as that sounds—and since I wasn’t able to coax him into speaking English more than sporadically, I had a friend come and play games with him, in English, and then it all moved very quickly. His passive understanding was already very advanced, and somehow all he needed was a gentle nudge, although this, evidently, had to come from someone who wasn’t one of his parents.

But as far as American heritage goes, I have to say that I pretty much failed on all fronts. There was a slew of stay-at-home mothers at the school, and they had ample time to bake cupcakes and volunteer for races and school fairs and other events, and of course these were the moms who cooked lavish Thanksgiving dinners and remembered all the American holidays. I just couldn’t do it, and I started to worry that my son was going to get an inferiority complex because the school was unfortunately very competitive. Apparently, I am a reluctant American, which is probably why I left in the first place. I gradually realized that I hated the American diaspora in Berlin, at least the (nearly) all-white, wealthy, largely conservative faction, because it felt to me to be indicative of everything I can’t stand about the country, everything that Americans take for granted, for instance cultural supremacy, entitlement, military hegemony. When my son wound up with a born-again Christian for an English teacher, and she gave him a bad grade on an essay he wrote in which he criticized the moral hypocrisy of the church congregation in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, I made the decision to change schools. I actually thought it might harm him to stay.

But the ironic thing is that my son actually does identify more with his American heritage, and oddly, he’s become the Italian American I’ve always avoided being—but it’s derivative and comes from watching Goodfellas and The Sopranos. And so I do my imitation of a Staten Island accent, which probably sounds pretty fake at this point, and we bond in this fictional, semi-simulated cultural identity we’ve carved out for ourselves, a little island of mother and son that we inhabit together that’s full of cultural references and inside jokes and has little to do with how I myself grew up in a second-generation immigrant family. It’s sweet, and ironic, and of course I have no idea if he would ever truly feel comfortable in the US in the long term, or would discover just how German he really is. When we bring up our children between cultures, I guess what we pass on to them is a kind of homelessness, isn’t it? But I’ve come to see this as a good thing, a promising thing. I think of it as a superpower, actually, a way of understanding the world more deeply, because displacement is—or will soon be—something that affects or will affect the majority of humans on this planet, and it’s enabled him to move around and feel comfortable very quickly in other cultures and languages. And maybe this, ultimately, is more valuable than having a single place to call home.

M.H.: Yes. And but! I still want to insist on a wound that those of us without a place to call home have and that perhaps isn’t comprehensible to those who have one and have of their own volition, for their own very good reasons, left it behind. You’re right to point to displacement as the new normal (of course for many not new at all), and I wonder how perceptions will shift as “having a place to call home” becomes more rare? My suspicion is that we will see an increase in atavistic fantasies around belonging, a culture to identify with fully, heritage, etc., a rigid insistence on a “somewhere” to identify with on the one side, and the kind of simulated, camp, knowing performativity of such fantasies, as you describe with your son, on the other. What I ultimately hope for on the grand scale of things, is that what I would be bold enough to call an anthropological need, that is, to connect with other beings, with places, with stories, with objects, can be satisfyingly met for people, regardless of whether their individual biographies are grounded in a particular place or not. Connecting with loss can be a meaningful connection too.

A.S.: Yes, or connecting with a set of ethical values—that’s a good way to find one’s tribe, I think. Because the “atavistic fantasies” you foresee worry me: loss, whether real or imagined, is a place where human beings are psychologically vulnerable, and for this reason easily exploited. Especially now, in Germany, where we’ve just witnessed a fascist party winning a majority of seats in Parliament in a state-wide election for the first time since the end of World War II. And a lot of that, as you mentioned earlier, has to do with Somewheres feeling threatened by change, particularly in the demographic. But “Heimat” is far more ideologically inflected than “home”—and the subject of another conversation altogether.