June 1, 2022
Mead's memoir is also part history lesson, part cultural commentary. After years of succeeding in New York, she returns to London, the city of her birth. Intent on giving her son an international perspective and wanting to leave the political situation in the United States behind, she weighs the costs and rewards of relocating. Comparing life in both locales, she depicts many lessons about New York, London, and herself. Mead shares some of her family history, which examines the relationship of people, places, and things. It will make listeners ponder how the place where a person lives can influence their life. Mead's confident voice and lovely accent make her the perfect narrator. There isn't a lot of drama. Instead, there's a solid telling in a manner that gives listeners the feeling that everyone everywhere could become friends. VERDICT Mead's book has a place in any collection of popular memoirs.--Christa Van Herreweghe
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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.