How to Leave
Quitting the City and Coping with a New Reality
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
An uproarious memoir and guide to leaving the big city
So you escaped whatever humdrum little town you grew up in and moved to The Big City. Maybe it was New York. Maybe it was Seattle or Kansas City. Wherever it was, there was amazing stuff everywhere you turned: Ethiopian food! A movie theater that played documentaries! A hairstylist who knew what to do with frizz! You overlooked the crime rates (edgy!), the proximity of your kitchen to your bed (convenient!), and the fact that you had to take public transportation to see nature, then had to share it with millions of other cranky, naked mole-rat apartment dwellers (urban!).
But then you got a job offer you couldn't refuse. Or you developed asthma. Or you got pregnant. Or you got pregnant for the second time and you couldn't use your closet as a bedroom for two babies. And you decided you had to leave.
When Frank Sinatra and Alicia Keys said that if you could make it in New York, you could make it anywhere, they probably weren't talking about the middle of nowhere or whatever suburb you used to make fun of. Because "making it" is really hard to do without world-class museums and gourmet food trucks. Erin Clune regales readers with priceless stories of her own experiences leaving New York for her hometown in Wisconsin, and provides a jocular but useful guide--for anyone leaving, or thinking about leaving, their own personal mecca--to finding contentment while staying true to yourself in a place far, far away from The City.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Comedic writer Clune shares her experience of moving from Manhattan back to her hometown of Madison, Wis., in this clever and amusing memoir cum "practical coping guide." Clune divides the book into four parts: "Deciding to Go," "Settling In," "Learning to Adapt," and "Mastery," with chapters describing her transition from New Yorker to Midwesterner. For her, the "tipping factor" in deciding to move after 20 years of living in the city was when her first child entered kindergarten, and she and her lawyer husband decided it would be easier to relocate to a more family-friendly environment and enroll the kids in public school. Clune soon misses fresh shellfish, chance encounters with celebrities, and other Manhattan perks, and finds that her irreverent, sarcastic communication mode doesn't work so well in the Midwest, where one should not indiscriminately "drop the f-bomb." She advises her readers to resist the urge to be "judgy," to curse, or to complain after a move, for there is "no perfect place." Clune's helpful narrative is peppered with entertaining anecdotes and humorous asides ("It also became apparent during that first year that my friends from New York were never going to visit") along with such sagacious observations as "moving is a process, not an event." This is a hilarious and comforting book for the recently relocated.
