author of I’ll Be Your Mirror: Essays and Aphorisms - David Lazar
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.
Hippocampus Magazine - Melissa Oliveira
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.
Missouri Review - Sam Pickering
Readers...discover traces of themselves, something good books foster. Such books exhilarate by awakening the personal, leading one to appreciate and understand.
Booklist - Courtney Eathorne
Fascinating and lyrical memoir.
Northern California Book Awards
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. . . . Mobile Home combines the lyric, the factual, and the dramatic in a prose style that is both hugely enjoyable and deeply moving.
New York Times Book Review - Lori Soderlind
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.
Kirkus Reviews
2020-07-07
An unsettled childhood inspires a meditation on self and place.
In 10 graceful essays, award-winning poet, essayist, and editor Harlan recounts her singularly nomadic childhood, during which she lived in 17 houses on four continents: 134 rooms, by her calculation, enough to comprise a mansion. “A mansion,” she writes, “lacking in clear boundaries, encompassing bits of Latin America and Alaska, Arabia and California, London and Houston, prefab and bespoke, gorgeous and hideous, common and bizarre.” She haunts these houses, “searching for answers—why your family lived this way, why not even beauty fused with safety was enough to make them stay, anywhere.” Part of the reason for so many moves was her father’s work as a civil engineer on projects such as the construction of the industrial city of Jubail in Saudi Arabia and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. But even when her parents relocated to California, they constantly moved, renovating and selling houses. In repeatedly new environments, Harlan honed a sensitivity to “fabrics of light, language, scent, and sound, their inherited and intuited meanings,” which inform all of her essays, including pieces on London (“a place where interesting always beats beautiful”), Stonehenge (which “has long attracted alluring, brilliant, and whack-job theories”), an African burial ground uncovered in New York City, the significance of archaeological artifacts, and homes, including her own, where she has settled with her husband and son. “Sometimes a house wants to be your mother,” she writes. “Sometimes a house wants to hide the evidence. Some houses would smother you with good tastefulness, a claustrophobic need to impress. Some houses would like you to calm down already. Some houses want you to get the hell out. Some houses get silly with nostalgia. Some houses are destined for the aftermaths of true love. Some houses couldn’t care less: you might as well be living in generic anywhere. But no one ever is.”
Sharply observed forays into the mazes of the past.
