When I picked up this neon pink, Barbie-esque looking novel, with its grim and realest title–No Place To Call My Own–I knew it would be something that would be the most devastating and also the most comforting modern literature I’d read this month.
As a person who just moved around a lot, being queer, and neurodivergent, it’s easy to fall into self-isolating patterns and pick detachment over feeling the mountain of feelings that come down on you. That’s kind of what Sophia goes through as well, and I don’t know if it was the visualisation that Alina Gufran (she/her), the author, creates, thanks to her filmmaking background. That, along with Sophia’s filmmaking background, allows both of them to show how a traumatized, angry, and apathetic person would see the world. It’s like reading a film, which is actually great if you’ve been experiencing a reader’s block and want something to throw you into a fictional world.
It also feels like a novel that will appeal to readers across multiple demographics, because who knows displacement and having no “real” space of belonging like women, queer folx and religious minorities? It’s queer in every sense to spend your whole life trying to figure out what’s wrong, but being unable to pinpoint what it is. It’s also queer in its understanding of never letting others label you.
No Place for the Wrong Feminist?
As much as I’m opposed to fitting this book into neater categories, such as Pinterest trends like “girl failure” or even the “anti-hero” (and what’s the term we use for complex male characters? “Grey”, “complex”, “nuanced”?)… It’s fluid writing. It goes between various locations like Delhi, Dubai, Mumbai and Chennai, literally marking different points of Sophia’s (our narrator) life. Her life is not entirely relatable. I can’t imagine myself in her place, but I know so many people who could. What connected me to Sophia was the ability to think the wrong things, do the “wrong” things and never backing down on her morals.
Sure, there are various moments where we question her morals, and there’s the observation that we don’t fully know what her actions are. We only find out when they become big to her—we remain closed in her mind until Sophia decides to let us peek into her world. When I asked Alina if she intended to always follow this line between realness and being morally grey when it came to characterising Sophia, she said, “It wasn’t ever about documenting reality, but perhaps about distilling something truer than mere fact. I feel, the line between the real and the imagined isn’t something to tread carefully—it’s something to erase, redraw, and blur at will. As for making a statement, I don’t think that’s the job. I believe fiction should trouble, provoke, and good fiction rarely ever provides easy conclusions.”
No Place for Bad Health?
The reason is her unreliable health, whether it’s mental, sexual or physical. When you’re consistently under threat of sorts and keep underplaying it, be it from neglectful parents or abusive relationships with people around you, it’s hard to let people into your world. Sophia trusts the readers just enough to let them hear her thoughts, but not to let them out in her world.
That’s also what depression does for her on a long-term basis. It’s constant detachment, and she’s just running around trying to find a place that won’t annoy her. To be honest, the annoyance is the most relatable thing. We love girl anger, but annoyance takes the cake for me. It’s also the ability to admit that you don’t always need a real reason to “dislike” people–sometimes you just find people annoying, and that’s all.
Reading word after word, I caught glimpses of myself, not because Sophia was me but rather I kept feeling the pain that comes from the numbness, or at least what led Sophia to deal with things the way she did. I asked Alina if the process of writing felt similar, or if it lead to some internal catharsis for her,
“Some parts were difficult because they demanded precision—how do you write about certain wounds without flinching, without turning them into spectacle? And some parts were cathartic, not in a way that offered closure, but in the way that shaping something into fiction can create a kind of distance. Writing wasn’t about relief or release; it just felt necessary.”
No Place For Tags
I don’t wish to place Sophia or this book/her story into a box for you. It’s a story I particularly resonated with, not just in a physical aspect of not actually belonging to a city (because I moved a lot), friend groups or even a particular label of queerness.
I got to ask Alina about her writing process and she told me,
“That instinct naturally informed No Place to Call My Own, where the visual and spatial dimensions of storytelling became as crucial as language itself. I wasn’t merely describing scenes; I was constructing them, aware of how a shift in light or a pause in motion could carry as much weight as dialogue.”
I don’t know a ‘Sophia’, but I empathise with them, despite knowing I might not even be able to be a good friend to them and vice versa. But that’s also the beauty of queer-feminist communities—there will always be an unspoken allyship with each other. There’s chaos, but there’s also nuances we don’t often hear about. Displacement is constant, and the chase for home is so painfully accurate. Even Alina felt like the novel was constructing itself with a few real experiences from her own life and some she felt Sophia would go through. She saw the themes emerge on their own as she went around serving Sophia.
You know that as long as you’re a part of any minority groups, you’re barely able to “behave” or be considered human enough. So, the exhaustion is real, and so are the consequences of failing to “fix” it.
Shout out to Anushka who thought I’d enjoy this, I certainly did and I think many more would love it too!
