MOBILE HOME: A MEMOIR IN ESSAYS was nominated for the 40th Annual Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction (2021) along with works by Rebecca Solnit, Kay Ryan, Joan Frank, and Elizabeth Tallent. In their nomination statement, the Northern California Book Reviewers wrote of MOBILE HOME:
“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. In the first seventeen years of her life Megan Harlan lived in seventeen different homes, ranging from a Los Angeles motel to an elegant London hotel to trailers located in the Alaskan tundra, the Arabian desert, and the South American jungle. To her ’emotionally itinerant’ parents—an engineer father and a super-homemaker mother—this nomadic life seemed not only necessary but desirable. For Harlan herself, it was a mixed blessing. 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. The wide-angle lens Harlan trains on her experiences accommodates many delightful facts: that the Bedouin oral tradition included something called stellar poetry; that spiderwebs are the strongest substance in the world; that the Crusaders brought the design element of the octagon to Europe; that Stonehenge may be a center for ley-lines (and what in the world these are). And Harlan, an award-winning poet, makes us experience the places she describes—their look and sound and feel and taste and smell: ‘a redwood forest’s deep feathery sweetness,’ ‘sand silky as sugar,’ ‘damp glowing greenery,’ ‘beetle-black cabs,’ ‘huskies with ice-blue eyes.’ Mobile Home combines the lyric, the factual, and the dramatic in a prose style that is both hugely enjoyable and deeply moving.”
