Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays (Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction Ser.)

Product Description

“Impermanence…is a resonant ache in this linked-essay memoir.”

–The New York Times Book Review

“In 10 graceful essays, award-winning essayist, poet and editor Harlan recounts her singularly nomadic childhood…Sharply observed forays into the mazes of the past.”

–Kirkus Reviews

Essays that explore the cultural traditions of nomadism, the psychology of domestic architecture, and the emotional landscapes of home.

Uprooting ourselves and putting down roots elsewhere has become second nature. Americans are among the most mobile people on the planet, moving house an average of nine times in adulthood.
Mobile Home explores one family’s extreme and often international version of this common experience. Inspired by Megan Harlan’s globe-wandering childhood–during which she lived in seventeen homes across four continents, ranging in location from the Alaskan tundra to a Colombian jungle, a posh flat in London to a doublewide trailer near the Arabian Gulf–
Mobile Home maps the emotional structures and metaphysical geographies of home.

In ten interconnected essays, Harlan examines cultural histories that include Bedouin nomadic traditions and modern life in wheeled mobile homes, the psychology of motels and suburban tract housing, and the lived meanings within the built landscapes of Manhattan, Stonehenge, and the Winchester Mystery House. More personally, she traces the family histories that drove her parents to seek so many new horizons–and how those places shaped her upbringing. Her mother viewed houses as a kind of large-scale plastic art ever in need of renovating, while her father was a natural adventurer and loved nothing more than to travel, choosing a life of flight that also helped to mask his addiction to alcohol.These familial experiences color Harlan’s current journey as a mother attempting to shape a flourishing, rooted world for her son. Her memoir in essays skillfully explores the flexible, continually inventive natures of place, family, and home.

Review

“Harlan and her family moved 17 times while she was a child, following her father’s work as an engineer across four continents. Impermanence defined her early life, and is a resonant ache in this linked-essay memoir. Her meditations on the meaning of places, houses and homes are rooted in her nomadic experience, if nomadism can be said to root anything…Perhaps, these essays suggest, home is after all the place that is ours–whoever and wherever we find ourselves to be.”

–The New York Times Book Review

“In 10 graceful essays, award-winning poet, essayist, and editor Harlan recounts her singularly nomadic childhood…Sharply observed forays into the mazes of the past.”

–Kirkus Reviews

“In prose rooted in the arc of an unsentimental education, Megan Harlan moves us through her unmanifest destiny, using the essay sharply as she takes us through the doors and tunnels, roads and bridges, trailers and cities, the spiders and fairies of her memory. Mobile Home is architectural and geographical, philosophical and historical, but always with an eye on the establishing shot: the nomadic Bedouin image of Harlan’s childhood that serves as a metaphor for our own extreme mobility.”

–David Lazar, author of I’ll Be Your Mirror: Essays and Aphorisms

“Wise, stoic yet wistful…Narrated in a deceptively tranquil voice,
Mobile Home moves deftly through many locales, through architectural history, through poignant family history, fusing research with experience as it ponders a single question: what it means to be rooted while rootless. Individual essays shift between only apparently incongruous ideas and experiences, the links between them creating new meaning, and together the essays build a coherent, climactic book.”

–Debra Monroe, Judge of the 2019 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and author of My Unsentimental Education

“The essays tell Harlan’s personal stories, but they are also well-researched. She