Hello Troj is a book that took over three decades to experience and 12 years to write. It is a book about growing up as a young female arts protégé during the last decade of Communism in Eastern Europe, in a society shaped by a rapidly disintegrating censorship apparatus struggling to sustain itself, in the world of the so-called “Intelligencia” governed by middle-aged white men, many of them prone to predatory behavior and accustomed to getting their own way. It is a deeply personal and unapologetic coming-of-age story that circles around the suicide of a younger brother and trying to figure oneself out in the context of dystopia and chaos.

But this is also a book about growing up in a family of heroes and madmen, all of them insanely creative but never recognized as anything but average, invisible, “just regular folks”. There is nothing “regular” or “average” about them.