HOME/LAND

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.