For a long time I didn’t write about Israel at all. It’s such a volatile place and people have such strong opinions and everything you write about Is… - Ayelet Tsabari

Home is collecting stories, writing them down, and retelling them. Home is writing, and it grounds, sustains, and nourishes me. Home is the page. The one place I always, always come back to.

On bad days, I looked at the paleness of the sky, and all I could see was how deeply fucked up everything was, how much the pain radiated from the earth, fury bubbling up like hot lava underneath the surface.
Other days, mostly at the beach, I would breathe in the saturated air and be filled with gratitude. Despite everything, this was the only home I knew. Flawed, imperfect, but home. And though my sense of belonging was fractured, still I belonged here more than anywhere else. Maybe that's why I held on to this dream of peace so desperately. I needed to believe we were heading somewhere better. If peace came, maybe we would finally be able to let out the breath we'd been holding for forty-seven years, and exhale. (chapter 19)

…So much of the writing process is done in the privacy of your own home, often in your pajamas, so I love that research forces me to get out of the house, try new things, meet new people. It keeps me from getting too comfortable and pushes me outside my comfort zone. Despite writing about places I know and communities I'm familiar with, there was still a lot of research to be done, and thank God for that! It would be really boring to write only about stuff I know so well that I never have to leave my desk to explore...