Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez argues that, for postcolonial autobiographers, home is a ‘contested site on which the cultural conflicts of the larger society are played out in microcosm’. Such a recognition is important for an exploration of Eva Hoffman's transatlantic memoir, Lost in Translation. In this text, Hoffman's childhood home, Poland, becomes a landscape of desire, a place she can neither return to nor abandon. Indeed, part way through the memoir Hoffman expands at length on her desire for Poland, and its continual pull on her:

Indeed, the very blurring of locations within Hoffman's memoir, as she moves from past to present almost seamlessly at times, indicates the way in which spaces are influenced, if not infected, by other spaces, and as home itself becomes a multiple site that resists final definition. Hoffman follows in a long line of critics and writers who see places as if on a continuum of being.