September 1, 2021
Journalist Cheung relates growing up in Hong Kong-- The Impossible City--after its 1917 reunification with China, traversing its rich identities while exploring her education at various English-speaking international schools, the city's literary and indie music scenes, and the protests against restricted freedoms. One of America's top pianists, MacArthur fellow Denk recounts his upbringing and training, clarifying the complexities of the artistic life and the student-teacher relationship in Every Good Boy Does Fine. As Drayton relates in Black American Refugee, she left Trinidad and Tobago as a youngster to join her mother in the United States but was angered by the contrast in how white and Black people were treated and by age 20 returned to Tobago, where she could enjoy being Black without fear. What My Bones Know reveals Emmy Award-winning radio producer Foo's relentless panic attacks until she was finally diagnosed with Complex PTSD, a condition resulting from ongoing trauma--in her case the years she spent abused by her parents before they abandoned her. Growing up fourth-generation Japanese American in Los Angeles directly after World War II, Pulitzer finalist poet Hongo recounts spending his life hunting for The Perfect Sound, from his father's inspired record-player setup and the music his Black friends enjoyed to Bach, Coltrane, ukulele, and the best possible vacuum tubes. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Negroland, Jefferson offers what she calls a temperamental autobiography with Constructing a Nervous System, woven of fragments like the sound of a 1950s jazz LP and a ballerina's movements spliced with those of an Olympic runner to explore the possibilities of the female body. In Home/Land, New Yorker staffer Mead captures the excitement, dread, and questions of identity that surfaced after she relocated from New York to her birth city, London, with her family in 2018. Vasquez-Lavado now lives In the Shadow of the Mountain, but once she was a Silicon Valley star wrestling with deep-seated personal problems (e.g., childhood abuse, having to deny her sexuality to her family) when she decided to turn around her life through mountain climbing; eventually, she took a team of young women survivors up Mount Everest (150,000-copy first printing).
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
November 1, 2021
A veteran New Yorkerwriter reflects on her midlife return to her native London after decades spent in New York City. Following the unexpected results of the 2016 presidential election, Mead moved with her husband and adolescent son from Brooklyn back to London, where she was born. Since she hadn't lived in England for more than 30 years, the experience was a curious mix of homecoming and alienation, the distinct strands of which Mead disentangles with nuance and writerly sensitivity. She traces her family history from its humble origins ("Ellen, my mother's mother, had been truly poor as a child") through a series of different London abodes, elegantly weaving in the larger socio-economic and urban-planning contexts of the storied city as she moves through each generation. In other chapters, Mead considers her arrival in New York City as a newly minted college graduate, her marriage, and the birth of her son. The author's commentary on these and other phenomena is unfailingly insightful, precise, and well written, as one might expect from a longtime New Yorkerwriter, but at times, the material can feel staid, its perspective narrow. The book is most engaging when it hews closely to Mead's personal life--e.g., when she notes that her 90-year-old mother has taken to wearing the color "emerald," a color she adopted in order "to be visible in her old age"; or when Mead admits that what she wanted to give her son by uprooting him was the "sense of displacement" she herself felt living for many years as a British woman in New York. This feeling, she writes, was "so constitutional to my own being that I seem to have been compelled to make it my son's inheritance. I have given him this questionable gift: a lost place to long for." A contemplative memoir about one writer's return to a homeland that no longer feels like home.
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November 8, 2021
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. Agent: Kathy Robbins, the Robbins Office.
December 1, 2021
In this newest work, journalist Mead (My Life in Middlemarch) examines the various places she has called home. Mead was born in London and raised in Weymouth, where she never quite felt comfortable, so she was glad to leave for university. She moved to New York in her early 20s and lived there for 30 years, but in the wake of the 2016 election, she, her husband, and son moved back to the United Kingdom. She describes New York as a changeable home: in Manhattan she rented her first apartments and began her career; in Brooklyn she experienced marriage, family life and professional success. Mead's experience of London, as a married parent and accomplished writer, felt different than it did when she was a student and brought about a host of adjustments. Mead reflects on what it means to become a citizen of a different country as an adult. Beyond personal identity, she also explores the impact of the geological, physical, and architectural makeup of a place on a national or regional identity. VERDICT This thoughtful book will appeal to memoir readers, especially anyone who has moved or who has thought about what it would be like to live in a totally different city.--Laurie Unger Skinner, Highland Park P.L., IL
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from January 1, 2022
Born in London, Mead lived in England until she turned 21 and journeyed to New York, where she thrived for three decades. She and her family were happy in their well-used Brooklyn brownstone until Trump's election spurred them to leave the country. London beckoned, and their ensuing decisions, logistics, and discoveries are purposefully explicated in this at once deep and far-roaming inquiry into home and identity. As in My Life in Middlemarch (2014), Mead, a writer of exacting observation, penetrating curiosity, and exhilarating clarity, thoughtfully meshes personal stories, cultural musings, investigations, history, and analysis in a candid chronicle alive with arresting perceptions and emotion. She compares the fabled metropolises of New York and London, mulling over what lasts and what disappears. Her family history overlays the London streets she walks, prompting tales of her grandmother, who worked as a cleaner and porter on the Tube, and of her mother, who advanced from messenger girl to executive at Harrods. Mead marvels over all the foxes in London and how children in this vibrantly multicultural city, including her young son, forge a new composite language. Literally immersing herself in her surroundings as she swims in the Hampton Heath Ladies' Pond in all seasons, Mead has created an enveloping, enlightening, and buoyant memoir of pulling up roots and transplantation.
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