Editorial Content for Home/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return

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.

"The lessons Mead absorbs and transmits are subtle ones, but no less meaningful for that.... HOME/LAND is...a reminder of the undeniable power of roots, in all our goings and comings."

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.