Narrative and the Subjunctive Imaginary An Expatriate Autoethnographer Reaches for Home Elissa Foster Abstract This article is a narrative response to an invitation from the editor of this special issue to meditate on the theme of ‘‘home.’’ The central nar- rative is a retelling of a retelling—the author’s brother recounting how he met ‘‘the man who saved his life’’ 20 years earlier and learned from him details of the story that were missing. For the author, the experience of listening to the story prompts an exploration of theories about the rela- tionship between narrative and time, the impact of the subjunctive imagi- nary when listening to stories, and the power of narrative to reveal what is important to us. Keywords: time, listening, death, brother In his call for papers for the 10th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Norman Denzin quoted the following lines from T. S. Elliot: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time (T. S. Elliot, ‘‘Little Gidding,’’ 1942) These lines speak to me, needle me gently but insistently, and remind me that I (like it or not) am a nomad, a gypsy, an expatriate. It has been 20 years since I left home— Australia—and soon I will have spent half my life away. Living life as an expatriate means many things. For me, it means cycles of anticipation, happy homecomings, too many goodbyes, and a constant search for a blend of technology to help me maintain some semblance of meaningful contact with those back home. It also means living part of my life in snapshots—like scenes I glimpse through the window as my train passes by—a phone call, a Skype call, a Facebook post, an e-mail packed with photos, or a link to a YouTube video. When I moved to the United States two decades ago, international phone calls were costly (the best rate I could get at the time was 25 cents International Review of Qualitative Research, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2016, pp. 67–75. ISSN 1940-8447, eISSN 1940-8455.  2016 International Institute for Qualitative Research, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. All rights reserved. Request permission to photocopy or reproduce article content at the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: 10.1525/irqr.2016.9.1.67. 67