First published 2021
Roger Bennett examines his transformation from an awkward Jewish adolescent in 1980s Liverpool to a prominent American cultural commentator. Bennett chronicles how American pop culture became his escape from the gray industrial city where he felt like a perpetual outsider. He traces his obsession from early exposure to The Love Boat through Rolling Stone magazine, NFL games, John Hughes films, and hip-hop artists like Run-DMC. The author details his methodology of consuming everything American while living in working-class Catholic Liverpool, where his private school background and Jewish identity already marked him as different. Bennett describes the pivotal summer he spent in Chicago as a teenager, including a transformative encounter with the Chicago Bears that crystallized his vision of American freedom. He argues that American popular culture offered him a blueprint for reinvention and belonging that his native England could not provide. The book offers readers both a detailed cultural history of late 1980s and 1990s transatlantic media and a framework for understanding how popular culture shapes identity and aspiration across national boundaries.
Genres: american, autobiography, memoir, biography-memoir, 21st-century, cultural-studies
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, personal-transformation
Setting: Chicago, Liverpool
Period: 1980s, 1990s
336 pages · Hardcover · Dey Street Books