by Rebecca Mead
First published 2022
Rebecca Mead examines her decision to leave New York City after three decades and return to London with her family in 2018. The New Yorker writer fled America's political climate while seeking broader horizons for her son. She chronicles her efforts to rebuild connections in a transformed London. Mead revisits Weymouth, the coastal town where she spent her childhood. She reflects on her early journalism career in New York and the challenge of creating a new life for her dual-national child. The memoir weaves together personal narrative with cultural observation, drawing from literature, art, and history. Mead confronts her parents' complicated influence on her life. Through encounters with people and places across both countries, she examines questions of belonging and identity. The book explores what we sacrifice when we abandon an adopted homeland and what we gain through geographic reinvention.
Genres: autobiography, biography-memoir, 21st-century, cultural-studies
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, reinvention
Setting: London, New York City, Weymouth
Period: 2018
241 pages · Kindle Edition · Grove Press UK