Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays

Megan Harlan

Dec 2020 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Karen White

About this audiobook

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.

About the author

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, and cited as distinguished in Best American Essays 2018 and 2019.

Karen White has been narrating audiobooks since 1999, with more than two hundred to her credit. Honored to be included in AudioFile's Best Voices and Speaking of Audiobooks's Best Romance Audio 2012 and 2013, she is also an Audie Award finalist and has earned multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards.