{"id":15139,"date":"2022-03-21T09:10:57","date_gmt":"2022-03-21T13:10:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=15139"},"modified":"2022-03-21T09:11:02","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T13:11:02","slug":"episode-478-rebecca-mead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-478-rebecca-mead","title":{"rendered":"Episode 478 – Rebecca Mead"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virtual Memories Show 478:
\nRebecca Mead<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/virtualmemories\/Episode_478_-_Rebecca_Mead.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div>

Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a><\/p>

Subscribe: Spotify<\/a> | TuneIn<\/a> | RSS<\/a> | More<\/a><\/p>\n

“There’s a sense of layered history in London, and you can see it written into the streets. You can walk in London and see a skyscraper on one side of you and the Roman wall of the city on the other.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>New Yorker contributor Rebecca Mead<\/a> joins the show to celebrate her wonderful new book, Home\/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return<\/a> (Knopf)! We talk about the adventure of making a midlife leap \u2014 her departure from NYC after 30 years & her return to England \u2014, the ways this memoir differs from My Life In Middlemarch<\/a>, the moment she truly felt like she was a writer at The New Yorker<\/a>, and The Book Cull, in which she and her husband \u2014 past guest George Prochnik (2014<\/a>, 2017<\/a>) \u2014 pared down to 170 boxes of books. We also talk about the mournfulness of moving house after 30 years, what she’s learned from profiling and interviewing cultural figures, the joy of reading about vikings for months on end for a big feature<\/a>, what being an American means to her, what it was like growing up in a Morrissey song<\/a>, and more! Give it a listen!<\/a> And go read Home\/Land<\/a>!<\/a><\/p>\n

“The more American I became, the more earnest & sincere I became, the more intolerant I became of English resignation and understatedness.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n