Overview

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 memoir in essays skillfully explores the flexible, continually inventive natures of place, family, and home.

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Karen White is the New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty novels, including the Tradd Street series, The Night the Lights Went Out, Flight Patterns, The Sound of Glass, A Long Time Gone, and The Time Between. She is the coauthor of The Forgotten Room with New York Times bestselling authors Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig. She grew up in London but now lives with her husband and two children near Atlanta, Georgia. Megan Harlan is the author of Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays, winner of the 2019 AWP Award Series for Creative Nonfiction. Her essays on nomadism, place, and identity have been awarded the Arts and Letters Prize for Creative Nonfiction, cited as distinguished in Best American Essays 2018 and 2019, and published in AGNI, Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, and Cincinnati Review, among other magazines. Her poetry book, Mapmaking, won the John Ciardi Prize and features work originally published in American Poetry Review, PBS NewsHour, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband and son in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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