5 ideas
In 2010 Hemon's nine-month-old daughter Isabel was diagnosed with an atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor, a rare and aggressive brain cancer. She died after months of surgeries and chemotherapy. Hemon describes the family as living inside an aquarium: they could see the ordinary world going on behind the glass but could not reach it or be reached by it.
Hemon rejects the consolations offered to the grieving: that suffering ennobles, that it teaches lessons, or that it serves a divine plan. He argues that such narratives protect the comforter's worldview at the sufferer's expense. A child's death is pure loss and cannot be converted into meaning or moral profit.
During Isabel's illness, Hemon's three-year-old daughter Ella invented an imaginary brother, Mingus, whose adventures and troubles mirrored what was happening in the family. Hemon reads this as the basic human mechanism of fiction. We build stories so that events too large to face directly can be worked through at one remove.
Nikola Koljević, the charismatic Shakespeare professor who had taught Hemon at the University of Sarajevo, became a leader in Karadžić's Serb nationalist leadership that besieged the city. Hemon looks back on seminar moments where Koljević's ideas already hinted at this. The episode shows that deep literary culture gives no protection against complicity in atrocity.
Stranded in Chicago in 1992 when the Bosnian war began, Hemon remade the city as his own through obsessive walking in neighborhoods like Edgewater. He built up personal memories of streets, shops and people until the city became a map of his own life. He defines home as the place where somebody notices when you are no longer there, so belonging comes from being recognized by others rather than from possessing a place.