I Called It Home

This is a poet’s memoir: of the river, the streets, the people—the events of his childhood and growing manhood, with each entry a kind of valentine of love for a time, and a place and its people, who all together made it strikingly real for the writer, whose portrait this is.

Reviews and Endorsements

“Kherdian proceeds with the stately thoroughness of an old-fashioned Armenian artisan, one who takes sustenance from the work itself. By scrupulously giving us the light and dark, the stone and wood, earth and water, flesh and pulse, of his own coming into consciousness as the child of Armenian immigrants, he finds a language that takes the reader, too, back to a common ground that refreshes and renews. In the end, he is tracing nothing less than the geography of a soul.” — Aram Saroyan

“It’s no small thing to write about the ghosts of the past and make their meaning surface out of the blood and mire of memory. That, more than anything else, is Kherdian’s greatness as a writer, and in conferring this upon us, the reader, we are given an invaluable gift: to imagine our own selfhood city, or own hometown streets, our own birth address, lost in the neglect of years. We can go home again.” — Gerald Hausman

“The subject matter of the old city itself is also a kind of distillation or rather a root, as in the word racine, of the themes that have obsessed the author throughout his writing life, and in reading each of these lyrical passages I feel myself also going back to where I grew up and seeing that we all come from the same place and will return there in due time. I wish I could write a book like this. It makes me feel good and makes me want to be good, too. ” — Peter Najarian