MIEKE EERKENS's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Creative Nonfiction, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica, among others. She earned an M.A. in English from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Eerkens teaches creative writing online for UCLA Extension's Writers' Program and as a visiting instructor for the Iowa Summer Writing Program. She divides her time between Amsterdam and California. All Ships Follow Me is her first book.
Mieke Eerkens has written a unique and harrowing account of the era
through the history of her parents, and while deeply moving and
brilliantly written, the particular backdrops give the story's
flavor an air of ambiguity and controversy.... Eerkens' book
provides a unique look at a different aspect of World War II, and
it's a beautifully told story of an ambiguous
situation.--PopMatters This memoir is honest, unflinching,
reflective, and carefully researched. . . . Eerkens's
self-awareness and desire to honestly grapple with the history in
front of her is worth every sentence. Reality is never an absolute,
and truth is always messy.--Book Riot A generational memoir of war
and its long-lasting effects on descendants....The author examines
the psychology of loss on the part of children caught helplessly in
tumultuous events....The sins of the fathers are visited on their
children, indeed. Eerkens' poignant book sheds new light on the
history of World War II.--Kirkus Reviews
A war memoir that reads as hauntingly and movingly as a novel...[A]
fresh and courageous look at Dutch, and indeed global, history, and
as importantly, at her parents, whose personal growth, strength,
and perseverance are nothing short of marvelous. Highly
recommended.--Historical Novel Society "In this masterful memoir,
Eerkens has written an epic account of her family's colonial and
wartime past that reckons with the often mysterious and
misunderstood legacy of intergenerational trauma. Lyric,
meditative, and deeply reported, this is an essential book that
reveals so much about what we need to know about being
human."--Jennifer Percy, author of Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism
"A thrilling, brilliantly told, briskly paced adventure story that
could not be more timely. In exploring the resilience of her Dutch
parents, who survive fascinating childhoods--he, as a young boy in
a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia, she, as a young girl in
a family persecuted by their fellow Dutch citizens for assisting
their German oppressors--Mieke Eerkens asks what it means to be at
once a victim, a colonist, and a collaborator. All Ships Follow Me
is an important work of literary nonfiction and essential reading
for Americans wondering about the responsibility they bear in the
modern age. It's a book you'll read in one sitting but will be
haunted by for years to come."--Kerry Howley, author of Thrown
"Setting her book within the chaotic and tragic aftermath of World
War II, Mieke Eerkens has composed a provocative and beautiful
story in All Ships Follow Me that boldly tightens its aperture on a
single family's experience, and unflinchingly exposes the welts of
history that can affect us all, and the inheritance of a sorrow we
share."--John D'Agata, author of About a Mountain The confluence of
conflicting war traumas fuels the emotional heart of Mieke Eerkens'
insightful narrative. All Ships Follow Me is an excavation of the
scars of war drawn from personal interviews, archival documents,
and immersion in the physical and psychic spaces of the past. It is
also an imaginative quest to understand how trauma influences
generations, sometimes directly through behavioral quirks and
aberrations but also through a vulnerability to sadness and the
illusion of home."--Patricia Foster, author of All the Lost Girls
"A remarkable and unique portrait of inter-generational family
trauma and collective guilt, All Ships Follow Me troubles the
waters, in the most nuanced and moving fashion, of more
conventional journeys of victimhood and good guys triumphing over
bad guys. In no way an apologist for her father's side of the
family, Dutch colonists of Indonesia for generations, or of her
maternal grandfather's participation in fascist politics in wartime
Holland, Eerkens nonetheless spares us excessive mea culpas.
Instead, she takes an unflinching and riveting look at the complex
histories of both sides of her family and the persistent if
invisible legacies of World War II and colonialism that followed
her to her childhood home in Southern California."--Robin Hemley,
author of Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness
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