Moving Back Home Isn’t Just a Fallback Plan
After Donald Trump came to power, Rebecca Mead couldn’t shake her agitation. For months, the longtime New Yorker writer felt that her existence had “shrunk down to a meager tunnel of survival.” When she realized that “the darkness was only at its beginning,” she began pondering her escape. Unlike so many other fantasizers at the time, as a British citizen she could turn an alternative reality into actuality. (Having a portable career helped, too.) So in the summer of 2018, Mead and her American husband, also a writer, seized the opportunity to give their dual-heritage son an experience of England as more than a tourist.
Ever the writer, Mead also jumped at the chance to get a book out of her move. In Home/Land: A Memoir of, she deftly layers historical research with autobiography to unsettle familiar ideas of homecoming—and of memoir-writing.
