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Home/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return
A moving reflection on the complicated nature of home and homeland, and the heartache and adventure of leaving an adopted country in order to return to your native land—this is a “winsome memoir of departure and reversal . . . about the way a series of unknowns accrue into a life” (Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror).When the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead relocated to her birth city, London, with her family in the summer of 2018, she was both fleeing the political situation in America and seeking to expose her son to a wider world. With a keen sense of what she’d given up as she left New York, her home of thirty years, she tried to knit herself into the fabric of a changed London. The move raised poignant questions about What does it mean to leave the place you have adopted as home and country? And what is the value and cost of uprooting yourself? In a deft mix of memoir and reportage, drawing on literature and art, recent and ancient history, and the experience of encounters with individuals, environments, and landscapes in New York City and in England, Mead artfully explores themes of identity, nationality, and inheritance. She recounts her time in the coastal town of Weymouth, where she grew up; her dizzying first years in New York where she broke into journalism; the rich process of establishing a new home for her dual-national son in London. Along the way, she gradually reckons with the complex legacy of her parents. Home/Land is a stirring inquiry into how to be present where we are, while never forgetting where we have been.
242 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 8, 2022
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876 people want to read
About the author
Rebecca Mead
10 books221 followersRebecca Mead was born in England, and educated at Oxford and New York University. She is a staff writer at the New Yorker, and lives in Brooklyn.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
April 18, 2022
As a British woman living in the U.S. I was excited to read Rebecca Mead’s book, as she has relocated back to Britain from the U.S. after thirty years, something I have considered doing from time to time during my tenure here. I wanted to read about her experience of re-acclimating to living in Britain after becoming ‘Americanized.’ I have no illusions that relocating back to my ‘home’ country would be quite an adjustment and probably more difficult than I imagine, requiring courage, stamina, and humbleness. Britain is no longer the same place I left in 1989, and hopefully, I have evolved also. As I read, I found some parallels to my own experience, which drew me in.
Rebecca Mead lived in England “until [she] was twenty-one and moved to New York for what [she] thought would be only a year, though it turned out [she] was still in the city three decades later.” I lived in England until I was twenty-four and moved to Montreal, Canada for what I thought was a year. Then, we moved to New York. More than three decades later, we are still in the U.S.
Rebecca writes about her decision to move back to Britain, “There was a buried yearning, on my part, to endow my son with a real sense of his dual-national heritage – for him to know England not just as a fun place to go on holiday, but as a culture he could move through with ease and confidence, a place that was not just mine, but his.”
She also writes about the turmoil of the current political climate as a motivator in moving and choosing to take action to relocate rather than remain still and in place. “We felt the exhilaration of upheaval. Because while it is true that we were shaken by the shifts in the world around us, another truth is that we chose to rock our own foundations. We decided to bring the upheaval upon ourselves. We chose movement, because movement is a kind of freedom, too.”
Rebecca reflects, “When I first arrived in New York it was remarkable to discover that the British accent, which I had come by without any conscious effort, was regarded as an asset.” I have experienced this also. In the U.S. my British accent seems to lend me an intelligence and respect that I am not entirely sure I deserve.
In contrast, “in England, my accent not only indicated the region of the country I was from but also revealed clues about my class background and my level of educational attainment.” So true! I remember especially that the ‘rural’ sounding accents of western or northern England were looked down on. Elocution lessons were popular at one point to help people sound more educated by changing/removing their regional accent.
Another area that can divide people or pressurize them to conform is clothing, what you wear makes a statement about who you are and your status. Rebecca receives a tip on the best charity shop for vintage clothing, “the Red Cross shop on the King’s Road in Chelsea – the best shopping strip to find deaccessioned trophies from affluent closets.” Rebecca ponders on this, as she had relished the time when she could finally afford to buy new rather than used clothing. In London, she has noticed the stylishness of women “who are no longer young, women like Sacha, whose clothes seem to display individual taste rather than industry-mandated conformity. They seem at ease, not acting as if they were obliged to cede the field to the young.”
This contrasts with the conception that at a certain age women become ‘invisible.’ When Rebecca’s mother comes to visit, she arrives “wearing pink lipstick, a sweater in the emerald color she has adopted in recent years – in order she tells me, to be visible in her old age, the neutral beiges, creams and blacks of her former wardrobe now a liability.” To wear color is to state, ‘I am here, look at me.’ Her mother has become colorfully bold.
Rebecca writes about her late father that their distance in miles “made it easier to fix our farewells in my memory than it might have been if I had lived just around the corner and had with him the kind of relationship where death comes as a surprise amid the ordinariness of life.”
She goes on to write, “In London, I am aware of my father’s absence in a way that is new to me. These streets to which I have returned from the landscape in which his origins lie – the environment which lingered in his intonation and phraseology.”
It’s a well-known saying in Britain, that you are never more than seventy miles from the sea. Britain is an island and prides itself on remaining uniquely British, while also negotiating with Europe and the rest of the world. “We are not just alone, a set of islanders who have our own way of doing things.” We realize there is a bigger picture. Britain is surrounded and protected by sea; “but the sea is also a gateway to other cultures and other worlds.” The sea shaped Britain’s identity.
When our firstborn son turned eleven, we faced the choice of whether to remain in the U.S. or return to Britain, where he was born. Ultimately, we chose to remain in the U.S. and relocate from New York to Chicago. Rebecca and her husband chose to move back to Britain when their son turned thirteen. As she writes, “I want to cultivate in him a sense of ambition and a quest to roam – attributes that, in my own adolescent experience, were nurtured by a sense of never quite feeling at home in my home.”
Interestingly, though we chose to stay put in the U.S. two of our children chose to relocate to Europe after reaching adulthood. We were used to having our extended family on one continent, while we were on another. What has been harder has been adjusting to being on a different continent from two of our three children. In the next decade, as we consider retirement, we will face, perhaps for a final time, the choice of whether to relocate back to Britain or remain in place in the U.S.
Finally, a passage from the book that speaks to my soul about the experience of moving back home: “This is what I have been doing since I arrived in London, what I am doing in this graveyard: sifting through fragments, filling in blanks, making imaginative leaps, all in attempt to weave myself back into the city’s fabric – entering into the ebb and flow of its tides, merging with its circulation. Having been born there, but having lived my life elsewhere, I can make no special claim on it now. I can only try to come to an accommodation with the city, like a speaker in a conversation: to try to understand, with the hope also of being understood. I can only try to find kinship within it, both with the living I meet, and the dead I’ve lost.”
Rebecca Mead lived in England “until [she] was twenty-one and moved to New York for what [she] thought would be only a year, though it turned out [she] was still in the city three decades later.” I lived in England until I was twenty-four and moved to Montreal, Canada for what I thought was a year. Then, we moved to New York. More than three decades later, we are still in the U.S.
Rebecca writes about her decision to move back to Britain, “There was a buried yearning, on my part, to endow my son with a real sense of his dual-national heritage – for him to know England not just as a fun place to go on holiday, but as a culture he could move through with ease and confidence, a place that was not just mine, but his.”
She also writes about the turmoil of the current political climate as a motivator in moving and choosing to take action to relocate rather than remain still and in place. “We felt the exhilaration of upheaval. Because while it is true that we were shaken by the shifts in the world around us, another truth is that we chose to rock our own foundations. We decided to bring the upheaval upon ourselves. We chose movement, because movement is a kind of freedom, too.”
Rebecca reflects, “When I first arrived in New York it was remarkable to discover that the British accent, which I had come by without any conscious effort, was regarded as an asset.” I have experienced this also. In the U.S. my British accent seems to lend me an intelligence and respect that I am not entirely sure I deserve.
In contrast, “in England, my accent not only indicated the region of the country I was from but also revealed clues about my class background and my level of educational attainment.” So true! I remember especially that the ‘rural’ sounding accents of western or northern England were looked down on. Elocution lessons were popular at one point to help people sound more educated by changing/removing their regional accent.
Another area that can divide people or pressurize them to conform is clothing, what you wear makes a statement about who you are and your status. Rebecca receives a tip on the best charity shop for vintage clothing, “the Red Cross shop on the King’s Road in Chelsea – the best shopping strip to find deaccessioned trophies from affluent closets.” Rebecca ponders on this, as she had relished the time when she could finally afford to buy new rather than used clothing. In London, she has noticed the stylishness of women “who are no longer young, women like Sacha, whose clothes seem to display individual taste rather than industry-mandated conformity. They seem at ease, not acting as if they were obliged to cede the field to the young.”
This contrasts with the conception that at a certain age women become ‘invisible.’ When Rebecca’s mother comes to visit, she arrives “wearing pink lipstick, a sweater in the emerald color she has adopted in recent years – in order she tells me, to be visible in her old age, the neutral beiges, creams and blacks of her former wardrobe now a liability.” To wear color is to state, ‘I am here, look at me.’ Her mother has become colorfully bold.
Rebecca writes about her late father that their distance in miles “made it easier to fix our farewells in my memory than it might have been if I had lived just around the corner and had with him the kind of relationship where death comes as a surprise amid the ordinariness of life.”
She goes on to write, “In London, I am aware of my father’s absence in a way that is new to me. These streets to which I have returned from the landscape in which his origins lie – the environment which lingered in his intonation and phraseology.”
It’s a well-known saying in Britain, that you are never more than seventy miles from the sea. Britain is an island and prides itself on remaining uniquely British, while also negotiating with Europe and the rest of the world. “We are not just alone, a set of islanders who have our own way of doing things.” We realize there is a bigger picture. Britain is surrounded and protected by sea; “but the sea is also a gateway to other cultures and other worlds.” The sea shaped Britain’s identity.
When our firstborn son turned eleven, we faced the choice of whether to remain in the U.S. or return to Britain, where he was born. Ultimately, we chose to remain in the U.S. and relocate from New York to Chicago. Rebecca and her husband chose to move back to Britain when their son turned thirteen. As she writes, “I want to cultivate in him a sense of ambition and a quest to roam – attributes that, in my own adolescent experience, were nurtured by a sense of never quite feeling at home in my home.”
Interestingly, though we chose to stay put in the U.S. two of our children chose to relocate to Europe after reaching adulthood. We were used to having our extended family on one continent, while we were on another. What has been harder has been adjusting to being on a different continent from two of our three children. In the next decade, as we consider retirement, we will face, perhaps for a final time, the choice of whether to relocate back to Britain or remain in place in the U.S.
Finally, a passage from the book that speaks to my soul about the experience of moving back home: “This is what I have been doing since I arrived in London, what I am doing in this graveyard: sifting through fragments, filling in blanks, making imaginative leaps, all in attempt to weave myself back into the city’s fabric – entering into the ebb and flow of its tides, merging with its circulation. Having been born there, but having lived my life elsewhere, I can make no special claim on it now. I can only try to come to an accommodation with the city, like a speaker in a conversation: to try to understand, with the hope also of being understood. I can only try to find kinship within it, both with the living I meet, and the dead I’ve lost.”
September 2, 2022
Decent memoir of a Londoner moving to New York in her 20's, then moving back home after 30 years.
March 1, 2022
I love Rebecca Mead but this book was ... a little boring. Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood for it. But there was no plot, no story beyond, we moved. There was a lot of family history, but even that didn't really feel like story, more like a setting of a scene.
February 25, 2022
Less about the move, much more about the author's family history and her time in NYC...it was okay, but not really what the review I read made it out to be.
February 11, 2022
This was a subjectively strange reading experience. I was initially drawn to this book because the author decided to move back to where she grew up after spending many years in New York, and I find myself in a similar situation, even though moving back any time soon is probably out of the question because of, you know, the plague.
I am younger than the author and I don't have children, but I could still see myself in the anxious thoughts that went through her mind, her worry about her parents ageing and not seeing enough of them, or even seeing them again at all. I also struggle with having spent half of my life in a country in which I've never truly felt at home, and the looming expectation the American government has of anybody with a green card becoming a citizen eventually. I have absolutely no desire to become one particularly because of the ritual in which they make you swear you'll pick up arms to defend the US. My parents grew up in a military dictatorship and I think borders are ridiculous: swearing allegiance to a very belligerent country is not a thing I'm going to do.
And I think that was the point in which I felt a profound disconnect with this book. Not because there's anything wrong with it or the way the author lives her life, but because you can have so much in common with someone and then become fundamentally disenchanted with your vicarious fantasies. So really, this book is fine, but I'm having a meltdown.
I am younger than the author and I don't have children, but I could still see myself in the anxious thoughts that went through her mind, her worry about her parents ageing and not seeing enough of them, or even seeing them again at all. I also struggle with having spent half of my life in a country in which I've never truly felt at home, and the looming expectation the American government has of anybody with a green card becoming a citizen eventually. I have absolutely no desire to become one particularly because of the ritual in which they make you swear you'll pick up arms to defend the US. My parents grew up in a military dictatorship and I think borders are ridiculous: swearing allegiance to a very belligerent country is not a thing I'm going to do.
And I think that was the point in which I felt a profound disconnect with this book. Not because there's anything wrong with it or the way the author lives her life, but because you can have so much in common with someone and then become fundamentally disenchanted with your vicarious fantasies. So really, this book is fine, but I'm having a meltdown.
April 18, 2022
As an expat in New York considering a move to London, I was expecting to get more of the author’s experience with this move. Rather, it’s filled with city and family history, and bits of her experience in each city. I quit reading after a couple chapters because I found myself skipping large parts to get to her story.
April 17, 2022
Writer Rebecca Mead moves back to London after spending years in New York City and becoming an American citizen. She takes a look at both lives as it continues.
February 6, 2022
After living for thirty years in New York City, the author, a staff writer for the New Yorker, decides to move back to England, where she hasn’t lived since she was eighteen. She and her husband are fleeing the ranting new president and entering a world of Brexit with their thirteen year old son. The author looks back at her early days in Manhattan, struggling to become a journalist and then travels all around England interviewing the people she meets, uncovering history and reestablishing the relationship with her ninety year old mother.
March 13, 2022
I just couldn't get into this one ... seemed to go here and there. Well-written rambling thoughts that I found difficult to follow. So, abandoned this one a few chapters in.
September 28, 2022
As many other reviewers have mentioned, this book was quite different from what I expected. I was picturing more about her decision, her move, and especially her adjustment to living in England again. This was more a book of reflections on her life in New York, her childhood, family history, and the history of places in both England and around New York. Still, it was interesting and gave me pause about leaving my flawed country and entering a different culture even if that culture also (sort of) speaks my language. I say this even after a very delightful time living 6 months in the Czech Republic.
Read
August 9, 2022I chose this book after reading (or hearing read?) the piece on Multicultural London English (MLE).
It was a bit boring overall, and yet there were sections and pieces that were interesting, like the discussion of MLE. Those tidbits must be what kept me reading.
It was a bit boring overall, and yet there were sections and pieces that were interesting, like the discussion of MLE. Those tidbits must be what kept me reading.
Read
August 22, 2022Mixed feelings; review on YT soon
July 23, 2022
What a dreadful boring read this is.
I was really interested to know how they navigated the difference between life in New York against London and how her son settled into the English education system.
Instead this book is full of boring random ramblings that are very seriously not interesting and don't particularly tie into anything.
There are so many good books out there, don't waste your time with this.
I was really interested to know how they navigated the difference between life in New York against London and how her son settled into the English education system.
Instead this book is full of boring random ramblings that are very seriously not interesting and don't particularly tie into anything.
There are so many good books out there, don't waste your time with this.
June 10, 2022
I only listened to half of this book. Rebecca Mead is a wonderful writer and I enjoyed her vivid descriptions of places, but at the half-point in the book, I know more about her family history than my own and there was no story here. This book seems more like a book recording her family lineage and the places they have inhabited than an actual description of trying to once again become a Londoner. I'm sure it would be a gem for any family member doing a genealogy study but family stories are so often just interesting to the family and this may be a sample of that case.
Again... I didn't finish! Maybe it gets more interesting, but when I've asked myself, "Why am I listening to this?" a third time on a book, it's time to give up.
Again... I didn't finish! Maybe it gets more interesting, but when I've asked myself, "Why am I listening to this?" a third time on a book, it's time to give up.
May 5, 2022
DNF.
Mead wrote a really compelling New Yorker article a little while ago about her decision to move to the UK that was filled with insightful and complex reflections on being an ex-pat, on identity, on USA-ness, and so on - especially given what the US has become over the past few years (don't @ me). I'm an immigrant to the US myself and I found the article sobering, inspiring, comforting.
So this book seemed a natural read, I presumed it would be extending that storyline. I don't know if that text from the article is in this book or not. I got overwhelmed with so much descriptive detail and history and it wasn't really what I was interested in reading. I gave it a good try, but had to give up.
Mead wrote a really compelling New Yorker article a little while ago about her decision to move to the UK that was filled with insightful and complex reflections on being an ex-pat, on identity, on USA-ness, and so on - especially given what the US has become over the past few years (don't @ me). I'm an immigrant to the US myself and I found the article sobering, inspiring, comforting.
So this book seemed a natural read, I presumed it would be extending that storyline. I don't know if that text from the article is in this book or not. I got overwhelmed with so much descriptive detail and history and it wasn't really what I was interested in reading. I gave it a good try, but had to give up.
February 13, 2022
In 2020, the New York Post reported on a survey of 1,000 Americans who had moved within the previous three years about their experience. Forty-five percent responded that moving is by far the most stressful event in life, ahead of even divorce.
Imagine how much more testing that process is when it involves leaving the country where one has lived comfortably for three decades and returning to the land of one’s birth. Rebecca Mead’s HOME/LAND is the warmhearted story of just such a transition, one that disproves the adage “You can’t go home again.”
Mead moved to the United States in 1988, following her graduation from Oxford, to pursue a graduate degree in journalism at NYU. Beginning with an internship at New York magazine, she advanced quickly in that field, eventually landing a position as a staff writer with The New Yorker, where she’s worked since 1997. She’s the author of the bestseller MY LIFE IN MIDDLEMARCH, a book that, with its blend of memoir and reportage, bears a certain pleasurable resemblance to this one.
A little more than a year after the election of Donald Trump, Mead, by now an American citizen, and her writer husband George decided to sell their home in “brownstone Brooklyn” and return to London with their 13-year-old son, Rafael. For all their deep dissatisfaction with the election’s outcome, she insists that angst about America’s direction wasn’t the sole factor motivating their choice. In part, they wanted to expose Rafael, on the edge of adolescence, to a different culture, but she also admits to feeling the “exhilaration of upheaval” as she acknowledges that they “decided to bring the upheaval upon ourselves. We chose movement, because movement is a kind of freedom, too.”
Mead spends considerable time reacquainting herself as an adult resident with the city of her birth, “all in an attempt to weave myself back into the city’s fabric --- entering into the ebb and flow of its tides, merging with its circulation.” She prefers buses to the Tube, because they make it easier for her to reconnect with the “allusive tangle” of London’s complex, idiosyncratic geography. One of her excursions takes place in the company of John, the carpenter she hires to build bookshelves in her new home. It’s only after she engages him that she learns he’s a former bank robber who’s recently been paroled after serving 43 years in prison for murdering a man in a pub brawl.
Mead uses these explorations to fill in the interstices of her personal story with fascinating bits of London’s history, geography and culture, including a glimpse of the city’s geology (it’s built mostly on thick, heavy blue-gray clay and is constantly in a state of subsidence) and the story of Thomas Hardy’s role, this time as an apprentice architect, in moving an old cemetery to build St. Pancras Station in the 1860s. Her daily all-weather swims in the Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath serve as a way of “not merely adjusting to the experience of being in cold water. It is a way of adjusting to the experience of being in England itself, with all the renunciation and loss that my three-person family’s move across the ocean has demanded of me.” Mead doesn’t linger for long on any of these vignettes, her approach enjoyably episodic rather than exhaustive.
When Mead was a child, her family moved to the town of Weymouth, on England’s southern coast, once home to Thomas Hardy and not far from the territory that provided the setting for his novels. It’s a place --- “overwhelmingly white and tight for cash, with an edge of violence that especially manifested late at night after the pubs turned out” --- whose beautiful setting masks its poverty, and not one she remembers with any fondness:
“But then, as now, the town itself felt like an end-of-the line kind of place --- a scruffy resort where the smell of frying fish-and-chip batter fills your nostrils as soon as you get off the train, and the seafront is clogged with shops selling cotton candy and smutty postcards.”
As chilly as Mead can be in recalling Weymouth’s most unappetizing qualities, she offers warm reflections on the parents who brought her there --- her father deceased for a decade and her mother still intellectually vigorous and relatively healthy at 90. Despite limited education (both were dropouts by age 16), they forged successful careers, her mother as an advertising executive with Harrods and her father a midlevel civil servant. She writes about the enjoyment she experiences in more extended and leisurely encounters with her mother, even as she recognizes the poignancy of the shrinking time they’ll have together.
As she journeys through her family history, Mead makes some interesting discoveries. One is the fact that a house she and her husband considered purchasing abutted the backyard of her father’s childhood home on Camden Square. Comparing this coincidence with those that arise in Victorian novels, and her taste for their “numinous significance,” she appreciates how this “invisible tracery in which the threads of my father’s life and mine have, against all odds, crossed and interwoven --- is charged, if not exactly with meaning, then with wonder.”
The lessons Mead absorbs and transmits are subtle ones, but no less meaningful for that. “Home is not merely where one lives, still less is it simply where one comes from,” she writes. “It can also be the place that one has carefully, imaginatively made into one’s own.” HOME/LAND is an eloquent testament to that proposition and a reminder of the undeniable power of roots, in all our goings and comings.
Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg
Imagine how much more testing that process is when it involves leaving the country where one has lived comfortably for three decades and returning to the land of one’s birth. Rebecca Mead’s HOME/LAND is the warmhearted story of just such a transition, one that disproves the adage “You can’t go home again.”
Mead moved to the United States in 1988, following her graduation from Oxford, to pursue a graduate degree in journalism at NYU. Beginning with an internship at New York magazine, she advanced quickly in that field, eventually landing a position as a staff writer with The New Yorker, where she’s worked since 1997. She’s the author of the bestseller MY LIFE IN MIDDLEMARCH, a book that, with its blend of memoir and reportage, bears a certain pleasurable resemblance to this one.
A little more than a year after the election of Donald Trump, Mead, by now an American citizen, and her writer husband George decided to sell their home in “brownstone Brooklyn” and return to London with their 13-year-old son, Rafael. For all their deep dissatisfaction with the election’s outcome, she insists that angst about America’s direction wasn’t the sole factor motivating their choice. In part, they wanted to expose Rafael, on the edge of adolescence, to a different culture, but she also admits to feeling the “exhilaration of upheaval” as she acknowledges that they “decided to bring the upheaval upon ourselves. We chose movement, because movement is a kind of freedom, too.”
Mead spends considerable time reacquainting herself as an adult resident with the city of her birth, “all in an attempt to weave myself back into the city’s fabric --- entering into the ebb and flow of its tides, merging with its circulation.” She prefers buses to the Tube, because they make it easier for her to reconnect with the “allusive tangle” of London’s complex, idiosyncratic geography. One of her excursions takes place in the company of John, the carpenter she hires to build bookshelves in her new home. It’s only after she engages him that she learns he’s a former bank robber who’s recently been paroled after serving 43 years in prison for murdering a man in a pub brawl.
Mead uses these explorations to fill in the interstices of her personal story with fascinating bits of London’s history, geography and culture, including a glimpse of the city’s geology (it’s built mostly on thick, heavy blue-gray clay and is constantly in a state of subsidence) and the story of Thomas Hardy’s role, this time as an apprentice architect, in moving an old cemetery to build St. Pancras Station in the 1860s. Her daily all-weather swims in the Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath serve as a way of “not merely adjusting to the experience of being in cold water. It is a way of adjusting to the experience of being in England itself, with all the renunciation and loss that my three-person family’s move across the ocean has demanded of me.” Mead doesn’t linger for long on any of these vignettes, her approach enjoyably episodic rather than exhaustive.
When Mead was a child, her family moved to the town of Weymouth, on England’s southern coast, once home to Thomas Hardy and not far from the territory that provided the setting for his novels. It’s a place --- “overwhelmingly white and tight for cash, with an edge of violence that especially manifested late at night after the pubs turned out” --- whose beautiful setting masks its poverty, and not one she remembers with any fondness:
“But then, as now, the town itself felt like an end-of-the line kind of place --- a scruffy resort where the smell of frying fish-and-chip batter fills your nostrils as soon as you get off the train, and the seafront is clogged with shops selling cotton candy and smutty postcards.”
As chilly as Mead can be in recalling Weymouth’s most unappetizing qualities, she offers warm reflections on the parents who brought her there --- her father deceased for a decade and her mother still intellectually vigorous and relatively healthy at 90. Despite limited education (both were dropouts by age 16), they forged successful careers, her mother as an advertising executive with Harrods and her father a midlevel civil servant. She writes about the enjoyment she experiences in more extended and leisurely encounters with her mother, even as she recognizes the poignancy of the shrinking time they’ll have together.
As she journeys through her family history, Mead makes some interesting discoveries. One is the fact that a house she and her husband considered purchasing abutted the backyard of her father’s childhood home on Camden Square. Comparing this coincidence with those that arise in Victorian novels, and her taste for their “numinous significance,” she appreciates how this “invisible tracery in which the threads of my father’s life and mine have, against all odds, crossed and interwoven --- is charged, if not exactly with meaning, then with wonder.”
The lessons Mead absorbs and transmits are subtle ones, but no less meaningful for that. “Home is not merely where one lives, still less is it simply where one comes from,” she writes. “It can also be the place that one has carefully, imaginatively made into one’s own.” HOME/LAND is an eloquent testament to that proposition and a reminder of the undeniable power of roots, in all our goings and comings.
Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg
March 28, 2022
I echo some other reviewers here to say this was just sort of meh. Not a pure memoir (unless those usually digress more into literature, wider history, etc. than I've experienced in the genre), Mead seems to be trying to write herself back into London and England's story, as well as describe the NYC-based life she left behind, including her own experience and (in the England parts) some family history/background. Photos or maps would have been nice--especially with the UK stuff, I could've used some help picturing the places she mentioned and their locations within the city. I'm not a "classic novel" person, so the discussions of Thomas Hardy, etc. did nothing for me. Note that she doesn't really get too deep into either Trump or Brexit, which was unexpected but nice.
In both cases, I was astounded by her apparent ease in finding decent places to live in two famously difficult real-estate markets! And I disagree with her recommendation that women in their early 40s not make any sudden career, relationship, etc. changes, due to, er, certain potentially compromising physical changes they're experiencing--I'll accept that we should probably subject our decisions to stricter scrutiny, to confirm that it's not just the hormones talking, but middle-aged women also don't need any more reasons to second-guess themselves. (Also, how old was she when she decided to make this move?!) Finally, the next time I move and people complain about how many boxes of books I have, I'll recall how she and her family moved 170 boxes of books--and across an ocean, no less!
I did find the info about the differing geology of NYC and London interesting--I had certainly noticed the metal "ties" on the ends of Victorian row buildings but didn't know what they were for. (Answer: to hold buildings up that are liable to tip over, given London's squishy substrate.) And I wish the McQueen Year 3 exhibit was still at Tate Britain.
In both cases, I was astounded by her apparent ease in finding decent places to live in two famously difficult real-estate markets! And I disagree with her recommendation that women in their early 40s not make any sudden career, relationship, etc. changes, due to, er, certain potentially compromising physical changes they're experiencing--I'll accept that we should probably subject our decisions to stricter scrutiny, to confirm that it's not just the hormones talking, but middle-aged women also don't need any more reasons to second-guess themselves. (Also, how old was she when she decided to make this move?!) Finally, the next time I move and people complain about how many boxes of books I have, I'll recall how she and her family moved 170 boxes of books--and across an ocean, no less!
I did find the info about the differing geology of NYC and London interesting--I had certainly noticed the metal "ties" on the ends of Victorian row buildings but didn't know what they were for. (Answer: to hold buildings up that are liable to tip over, given London's squishy substrate.) And I wish the McQueen Year 3 exhibit was still at Tate Britain.
August 25, 2022
Rebecca Mead left England to complete her education in the United States. She got degrees, found employment, began a career as an editor and author. She married, had a son, and became a citizen. But she never relinquished the sense that she was English. Her husband, also from European ancestry and American ancestry too, shares her antipathy for the direction of the United States, and he is amenable to moving toLondon with their fifteen-year-old son. This book is the story of Mead’s search for connections to her homeland after a long absence. It is possible to live somewhere for a long time and never feel part of a community. Language, religion, skin color, community acceptance can complicate the feeling of being dislocated. Rebecca Mead had none of these complicating factors. It was an internal feeling of loss that lead her to return.
Her family appears to have lived in or near London for many generations. They were mostly poor and unremarkable laborers and lower working class. She has researched the times in which her family lived through contemporaneous paintings. One of her grandfathers or great grandfathers worked at a famous drinking house, the Cafe Royale. Now demolished, the cafe lives on in a painting, which she found. In the past, her family had lived in public housing, lived through the bombardment of World War II, and moved to better neighborhoods as they worked and got better education. All of this gives her a great feeling of belonging.
This sense of the need for belonging is what makes this book memorable.
Her family appears to have lived in or near London for many generations. They were mostly poor and unremarkable laborers and lower working class. She has researched the times in which her family lived through contemporaneous paintings. One of her grandfathers or great grandfathers worked at a famous drinking house, the Cafe Royale. Now demolished, the cafe lives on in a painting, which she found. In the past, her family had lived in public housing, lived through the bombardment of World War II, and moved to better neighborhoods as they worked and got better education. All of this gives her a great feeling of belonging.
This sense of the need for belonging is what makes this book memorable.
May 1, 2024
First the audiobook read by the author, next, I've ordered the print edition. so I write notes in it. Just my kind of read, one I can return to anytime, anywhere, open the page or audiobook and enjoy. Within 5 minutes I was hooked, for she writes of familiar places (not NYC) issues, policies, remembrances my mind mulls over. Returning to places of one's childhood boils up mixed feelings. It's hard not to compare current times with a former generation, as with her son. I am not of the same generations as author, but understand her comments and remembering.
Possibly it helps interest as an Anglo-Saxon-phile, history, places, eras. Her shipping vessel Gairloch; St. Pancras church & area where my ancestors were baptized; marriages at Grey Friars ruins near the Old Bailey; and Eyams, the surrounding hills in Derbyshire. (Here I thank another author, Geraldine Brooks). I love how she wore her boots ready for a 7 mile walk reminded me of the series Walking Through History with Tony Robinson.
Possibly it helps interest as an Anglo-Saxon-phile, history, places, eras. Her shipping vessel Gairloch; St. Pancras church & area where my ancestors were baptized; marriages at Grey Friars ruins near the Old Bailey; and Eyams, the surrounding hills in Derbyshire. (Here I thank another author, Geraldine Brooks). I love how she wore her boots ready for a 7 mile walk reminded me of the series Walking Through History with Tony Robinson.
February 27, 2025
A nice respite from the overwhelming awful news of these times.
Rebecca Mead, British by birth but a New Yorker for decades, is thrown by the 2016 election win by Donald Trump. She is by then an established reporter/writer, as is her husband. They decide, while their teenage son is young enough to view change as an adventure, to move back to England.
She is aware that her birthplace has its own political problems and uncomfortable history, but she is, by nature, someone who loves to explore.
There is a lot of reportage and historical fact amidst the more personal remembrances of her childhood, her heritage, her love of The Big Apple.
It is hard not to be a little jealous of her amazing success story - one that allows her to have owned property in both NYC and London, two of the great cities in the world.
My favorite section is the one about her London contractor John, who is also an ex felon. Strangely, I found his story the most relatable.
The descriptions of art, gardens, and most of all the sea, are as beautiful as any I have ever read.
Rebecca Mead, British by birth but a New Yorker for decades, is thrown by the 2016 election win by Donald Trump. She is by then an established reporter/writer, as is her husband. They decide, while their teenage son is young enough to view change as an adventure, to move back to England.
She is aware that her birthplace has its own political problems and uncomfortable history, but she is, by nature, someone who loves to explore.
There is a lot of reportage and historical fact amidst the more personal remembrances of her childhood, her heritage, her love of The Big Apple.
It is hard not to be a little jealous of her amazing success story - one that allows her to have owned property in both NYC and London, two of the great cities in the world.
My favorite section is the one about her London contractor John, who is also an ex felon. Strangely, I found his story the most relatable.
The descriptions of art, gardens, and most of all the sea, are as beautiful as any I have ever read.
September 22, 2025
The English author becomes an American citizen after living in NY for several years.
"It turned out that taking citizenship didn't require me to conform to some narrow definition of what an American is. Rather, it proved that the definition of an American was expansive enough to include me."
I do wonder if this is still true. Still, her family decide to emigrate to the UK, her birthplace. Oddly, little of the actual move is included here. Her 13 year old son would have had a challenging time in his new school/country. Instead, the reader gets a lot about her ancestors some of which is speculative.
I was hoping for more about this adjustment period, as my family has moved countries a few times. It is never without some unpleasant shocks. They left during 2018. Wonder how they're doing now.
Gloucestershire library
"It turned out that taking citizenship didn't require me to conform to some narrow definition of what an American is. Rather, it proved that the definition of an American was expansive enough to include me."
I do wonder if this is still true. Still, her family decide to emigrate to the UK, her birthplace. Oddly, little of the actual move is included here. Her 13 year old son would have had a challenging time in his new school/country. Instead, the reader gets a lot about her ancestors some of which is speculative.
I was hoping for more about this adjustment period, as my family has moved countries a few times. It is never without some unpleasant shocks. They left during 2018. Wonder how they're doing now.
Gloucestershire library
September 26, 2022
An excellent memoir about the author's life living in both the United States and England. She and her family are moving back to England where she grew up, went to college, got a job, then moved to New York City, moved back to London for a short bit, then moved back to NYC and stayed for 30 years, became an American citizen, and then moved back to London.
But the story jumps around from the present day to her early life, the lives of her parents, and their parents, etc. British history is covered via stories about the Church, kings, queens, politics, architecture, and a lot of social history.
I felt I was reading a very long article from The New Yorker. I should have: she has been a staff writer there since 1997.
An excellent book.
But the story jumps around from the present day to her early life, the lives of her parents, and their parents, etc. British history is covered via stories about the Church, kings, queens, politics, architecture, and a lot of social history.
I felt I was reading a very long article from The New Yorker. I should have: she has been a staff writer there since 1997.
An excellent book.
April 12, 2022
Mead’s memoir is part history lesson, part cultural commentary and part memoir. After years of “making it” 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, she weighs the costs and rewards of relocating. Comparing life in both locales, we learn a lot about New York, London, and the author. Mead shares some of her family history while examining the relationship of people, places and things. How does where you live influence your life? Narrated by the author, Mead’s confident voice and lovely accent make her the perfect narrator. A pleasure to listen to.
September 6, 2022
A quiet, pleasant sort of book, more of a procession of thoughts, observations, and feelings than a traditionally narrative-driven memoir. After deciding to move from New York, her home of many decades, back to London, the land of her birth, Rebecca Mead reflects on change, movement—across oceans, as well as through time & cultures—her family history, and what the concept of home has meant to her. The writing was sometimes a bit dry and dense to get through, but I like her thoughtful, reflective tone. I also like the way she treats places as living beings, each with their own distinct quirks & personalities.
May 27, 2023
3.5 - as well written as I would have expected, after reading "My Life in Middlemarch." Interesting historical and personal detail, though the book seemed to end with more of a whimper than a bang. Probably it would be more interesting to someone (like me) who has strong affinity both for the US and Great Britain--less of a general home-of-birth/chosen home memoir than this very personal one. I resonated to "A sense a displacement is 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."
March 11, 2023
My guess is that I may have given this 5 stars if I’d read the book rather than listened to the audio. The author’s voice reminded me of a sleep story from the Calm app and made it challenging for me to remain engaged. The story itself was deep and profound, exploring belonging and home and longing. History of land and structures interwoven with generational histories made me feel the connectedness of us all even more. Beautifully constructed, layer upon layer. Even the cover drew me in more deeply.
October 25, 2025
In Home/Land, Rebecca Mead plumbs the layers that constitute home: the geologic, social, and historical, as well as the people, both living and dead, that give place meaning. Her memoir about leaving her adopted home of New York City and relocating with her family to her birthplace in England due to political instability in the US is a story of departure and return. The Brooklyn neighborhood is which she lived for decades gives way to a rediscovery of the country she left. Beautifully written, with a poignant exploration of why it was important to both leave and return.
June 23, 2022
Some books hit at exactly the right time, and that happened here for me. Last summer I went to New York; this spring I was in London. And she processes her thoughts through Dickens, Hardy, Woolf, Arnold, and Pre Raphealites, all stuff I love. And we have even dreamed of what it would be like to move to London with a middle schooler in tow. A little too much family history in here, but a lovely read with wonderful moments to consider about both New York and London.
July 23, 2022
As someone who, like Mead, came to New York in my twenties thinking I’d stay a year then go home and ended up still here decades later, this really hit home (ha). She’s a decade younger than I am and has escaped the awful place the USA has become by moving back to London. She writes insightfully about the dislocations of being both and neither in several identities.
January 7, 2023
I had to put this down to complete others. Holidays also interrupted.
Mead, left Britain as a young woman to create a life in NYC. She returned as a middle aged wife and mother with her family in tow.
The writing was gorgeous and thoughtful, but the pacing was varied. I am used to gliding through books quickly and effortlessly, making this one’s challenges welcome, but sometimes frustrating.
Mead, left Britain as a young woman to create a life in NYC. She returned as a middle aged wife and mother with her family in tow.
The writing was gorgeous and thoughtful, but the pacing was varied. I am used to gliding through books quickly and effortlessly, making this one’s challenges welcome, but sometimes frustrating.
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