Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays

Mobile Home explores the emotional structures and metaphysical geographies of home as 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. In ten evocative linked essays, she 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, Harlan traces the family histories that drove her parents to seek so many new horizons—and how they've shaped her: Her mother viewed houses as a kind of large-scale plastic art ever in need of renovating; while her father, a natural adventurer, loved nothing more than to travel, choosing a life of flight that also helped to mask his addiction to alcohol. Alongside Harlan's own journey today attempting to shape a flourishing, rooted world for her son, Mobile Home skillfully maps the flexible, continually inventive natures of place, family, and home.