Home/Land
A Memoir of Departure and Return
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- 8,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
A moving reflection on the complicated nature of home and homeland, and the heartache and adventure of leaving an adopted country in order to return to your native land—this is a “winsome memoir of departure and reversal . . . about the way a series of unknowns accrue into a life” (Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror).
When the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead relocated to her birth city, London, with her family in the summer of 2018, she was both fleeing the political situation in America and seeking to expose her son to a wider world. With a keen sense of what she’d given up as she left New York, her home of thirty years, she tried to knit herself into the fabric of a changed London. The move raised poignant questions about place: What does it mean to leave the place you have adopted as home and country? And what is the value and cost of uprooting yourself?
In a deft mix of memoir and reportage, drawing on literature and art, recent and ancient history, and the experience of encounters with individuals, environments, and landscapes in New York City and in England, Mead artfully explores themes of identity, nationality, and inheritance. She recounts her time in the coastal town of Weymouth, where she grew up; her dizzying first years in New York where she broke into journalism; the rich process of establishing a new home for her dual-national son in London. Along the way, she gradually reckons with the complex legacy of her parents. Home/Land is a stirring inquiry into how to be present where we are, while never forgetting where we have been.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New Yorker staff writer Mead (My Life in Middlemarch) recounts her experience leaving New York City for her native England in this vivid, searching memoir. She left the city with her husband and teenage son in the summer of 2018; disillusioned by the state of American politics, she felt the time was right for a change of scenery, to offer more experiences for travel to her son, and to revisit her past. Mead eloquently and thoughtfully recounts the ineffable things that create "belonging" through the chronicle of her move, paints a vivid picture of having created a home in New York, and describes experiencing "the last weeks" of her time in her Brooklyn home "like a death." Then, after arriving in England, she learns her charismatic carpenter "until recently had had the distinction of being Britain's longest-serving prisoner," and recalls the tended gardens and "warm and lit and welcoming" rooms in her hometown of Weymouth as she considers what she'll do with her childhood home after her mother's death. Her prose is razor-sharp, and her story is deeply personal but universal in its explorations: "A relationship with a place, like a relationship with a person, is made up of many threads of connection." The result is poignant and memorable.
