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Rebecca Mead

Biography

Rebecca Mead

Rebecca Mead has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1997. She has profiled many subjects and has contributed more than 200 pieces to the Talk of the Town. She is the author of ONE PERFECT DAY, MY LIFE IN MIDDLEMARCH and HOME/LAND. She has served as a McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University and is the recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in London.

Rebecca Mead

Books by Rebecca Mead

Home/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return
by Rebecca Mead - Memoir, Nonfiction

When New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead relocated to her birth city of 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 30 years, she tried to knit herself into the fabric of a changed London. The move raised poignant questions about place: 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 HOME/LAND, Mead artfully explores themes of identity, nationality and inheritance.

My Life in Middlemarch
by Rebecca Mead - Nonfiction

Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's MIDDLEMARCH. After gaining admission to Oxford and moving to the US to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread MIDDLEMARCH, which offered her something that modern life and literature did not. Here, she leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written.