Author Profile: Marianne Maili

Sometimes the greatest adventure is returning home.

Such is the case in Marianne Maili’s latest book, “I am Home,” which explores what home means to the narrator as she returns to “the cradle of her civilization in Key West, Iowa,” after almost a quarter century abroad.

Written in short, poetic chapters, the book touches on a number of universal themes, including “love, loss, what home means, what it’s like to go away and come back, being with aging and dying parents, motherhood, personhood, and womanhood,” Maili explained.

“It can be read as a sort of love letter to family and community in that beloved part of northeast Iowa,” she said.

A Key West native herself, Maili has lived abroad for many years, first for her career as an international model, and then as an academic, receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Barcelona. She currently lives in Spain and is at work on her next book.

The book “I am Home,” initially began as an imagined conversation with an unknown reader, “someone I imagined sitting down with each day for an intimate chat.”

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“The goal at first was to turn grief into art. I was going through difficulty and a friend urged me to write about it with my humor. I wasn’t sure where to start and another friend suggested I start with the now. So each day I sat down as if for a chat with the reader and wrote about what was going on in that now, and then went back a bit in the past, in a sort of ‘where were we?’ moment, following the story of how a person makes a choice to return to where they started in life and the consequences and choices that follow that one.”

“The brief chapters turn to different moments in life in different times and places, so the book can be picked up and read from any point, while the whole of it tells a bigger story.”

While “I am Home” is certainly inspired by her own life, Maili wrote the book in such a way that “readers can easily imagine themselves in this story with the narrator.”

One way she did this is by making a small, powerful shift in her writing: she refers to characters by their relationship to the narrator (“a friend,” or “dad”) instead of by name.

“Just saying ‘dad’ evokes a lot in a person,” Maili explained. “More than, say, ‘my dad.’ Then it becomes something that (readers) can’t get as close to.”

By making this stylistic choice, Maili hopes readers can easily become part of the story, bringing their own characters — and memories — to the reading experience.

And while the narrative is universal, Maili grounds the work in geographic specifics, something readers from Eastern Iowa will particularly enjoy.

“Though I didn’t give people names, places got their names. It opens in Paris, it moves to Iceland, then it’s in Iowa. Dubuque, Iowa, is on the page, Key West, Iowa, is on the page …. The Mines of Spain, Swiss Valley Park, the Mississippi River plays a big part in it — a lot of key moments happen along the river.”

All told, “I am Home” reminds readers to savor the small moments in life as well as the large events.

“The book is about the wideness of love and how it changes us and helps us become more of who we are at the same time. How loving and being loved helps to free us into becoming ourselves.”