Mead is a longtime New Yorker staff writer and a fine stylist and investigative reporter.  In this ‘Memoir of Departure and Return’ she writes of her departure from NYC where she had lived for 30 years developing a career, marrying, raising a son, and loving her Fort Greene, Brooklyn brownstone.  She and her husband, a descendant of Mayflower Brits, decide to return to her city of birth, London, in the aftermath of the 2016 election when they feel that America and the world are losing their bearings and spinning out of control.

Channeling Graham Greene whose ‘The End of an Affair’ took place in the part of London where she was born and Thomas Hardy who lived near Weymouth where she grew up, she found in both authors the desire to start anew, to leave the comfortable usual and discover new opportunities.  She describes Hardy’s oscillations between the Wessex coast and London as ‘He must have thought about what he’d given up, what he’d left behind—-and also about what he could make of what he had been left with.’

I found the book to be a bit unsatisfying as Mead toggled back and forth in settings between London, Brooklyn, Weymouth, Brighton and in time as she moved from her childhood through her early years in New York to her move back to England.  She provided lots of details about her lineage with factoids about parents, grand-parents and even great-grandparents on both sides, and I was often lost among the Georges, Sams, Ivys, Sids, et al.

I most enjoyed her wanderings through London’s railroad stations, churches, and cemeteries which left me with the desire to return to that fabled city.  Overall, however, I was left wanting both more and less, more of her observations about time and place, and less information about her forbears. This is the kind of superb writing and observations that I wanted more of:  “This is what I’ve been doing since I arrived in London, what I am doing in this graveyard: sifting through fragments, filling in blanks, making imaginative leaps, all in an attempt to weave myself back in the city’s fabric—-entering in the ebb and flow of its tides, merging with its circulation…I can only try to come to an accomodation with the city, like a speaker in a conversation:  to try to understand with the hope also of being understood.  I can only try to find kinship within it, both the living I meet and the dead I’ve lost.”  Terrific writing about important thinking.