MOBILE HOME: A Memoir in Essays
Published by the University of Georgia Press in September 2020.
Winner of the 2019 AWP Award Series for Creative Nonfiction, selected by Debra Monroe.
Winner of the 2021 Independent Book Publisher Award (IPPY) Gold Medal in Creative Nonfiction.
Nominee/Finalist for the 2021 Northern California Book Awards in Creative Nonfiction.
Critically acclaimed in the New York Times Book Review, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere.
A Good Morning America Book Club Pick.
Media appearances: Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books, Marin Independent Journal, San Jose Mercury News, New Books Network.
Writing Conference Speaker, Panelist, or Teacher: AWP Annual Conference, Litquake (San Francisco), Red Clay Writers Conference.
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.
Reviews
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.
—Lori Soderlind, 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.
In this fascinating and lyrical memoir, Harlan examines the psychology of place by sharing her experiences as a child living in 17 different homes around the world…Harlan uses architecture, history, and archaeology to study why past peoples have sustained a nomadic existence, and how her own family fits into a global narrative of transience...
—Courtney Eathorne, Booklist
A wholly original take on memoir, this collection of essays approaches its subject from varying perspectives to give the reader a rich and enveloping experience of a life…Her lively voice renders the complex, quirky, sometimes tragic family life that resulted, in a vivid story laced with ongoing meditations on wanderlust, on place, on belonging, on love…Mobile Home combines the lyric, the factual, and the dramatic in a prose style that is both hugely enjoyable and deeply moving.
—Northern California Book Reviewers, on behalf of the 2021 Northern California Book Awards
…Megan Harlan recounts inhabiting a world of homes. Her father was a successful engineer, and when Harlan was young, she lived in seventeen different homes on four continents. These ranged from houses to motels, hotels, and trailers, a maze of 134 rooms, not quite as large as Sarah Winchester’s Queen Anne mansion in California, which today consists of 160 rooms, among them six kitchens and forty bedrooms. The rooms of Harlan’s home are more interesting, however, than those of Winchester’s museum. The furnishings vary greatly, and the rooms encourage readers to wander the neighborhoods of their minds and to speculate about the places in which they lived and the people who they were and might have been…Readers follow Harlan’s footsteps and, like Pooh and Piglet, suddenly notice their own tracks. Although they don’t catch any Woozles, they discover traces of themselves, something good books foster. Such books exhilarate by awakening the personal, leading one to appreciate and understand…
—Samuel Pickering, The Missouri Review
The essays in Mobile Home are lyrical and big-hearted and thoughtful…Harlan’s nuanced take has much in common with essays by Jo Ann Beard, Annie Dillard or Maggie Nelson: inventive structure, detailed imagery, and a voice that dips through layers of archaeology, history and architecture, deepening each essay’s resonance.
—Melissa Oliveira, Hippocampus Magazine
Wise, stoic and yet wistful, Mobile Home sidles up to a family story so moving that a traditional memoir would feature it as a harrowing predicament to be overcome. Instead, this book contextualizes sorrow, death, and discontinuity, reminding us that—in terms of human experience—sorrow, death, and discontinuity aren’t rare, that we don’t overcome them as much as incorporate them into a self in which every memory becomes a familiar room or passage, a self that, no matter where we go, is home. Narrated in a deceptively tranquil voice, this book 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, 2019 AWP Award Series for Creative Nonfiction
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. ‘I don’t know where I’m from, but who wants to hear that?’ she asks. We do, most emphatically.
—David Lazar, author of I’ll Be Your Mirror: Essays and Aphorisms
In this meticulously researched debut collection, Harlan explores questions about how we become ourselves through fascinating stories of the many places she has called home.
—Zoë Bossiere, New Books Network
The essays tell Harlan’s personal stories, but they are also well-researched. She examines the cultural histories of places, from Bedouin nomadic traditions to modern life in mobile homes. She studies the psychology of motels and suburban tract housing, as well as the built landscapes of the Manhattan metropolis….Harlan connects each space to her family’s story, but also extends and expands the ideas of home. The prose in Harlan’s essays is remarkably unsentimental as she guides us through the natural and built landscapes of her formative years. The family history, for all of its chapters about roaming, still speaks to a kind of stability and maintains a definite poignancy.
—Yvette Benavides, Texas Public Radio
Media Appearances
- Mobile Home featured on Good Morning America‘s Book Club, September 2020.
- Print interview in the Marin Independent Journal, September 2020.
- Print interview in the San Jose Mercury News, September 2020 (an edited version of the Marin IJ interview).
- Podcast interview on Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books with host Zibby Owens, October 2020.
- Podcast interview on New Books Network with host Zoe Bossiere, November 2020.
Book Trailer and Author Photo:
