In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Against the advice of family and friends, a middle-aged couple leaves their home and jobs in North Carolina to pursue a long-held desire: to live in New York City. As they struggle to find work and forge friendships in a city of strangers, Rebecca decides to take her mother's advice to "make a home wherever you land." She finds it in surprising

Reviews

"This marvelous book is a treasure chest of wisdom and humility and humor and discovery. I read it in one sitting. So will you."Abigail Thomas,New York Timesbestselling author ofA Three Dog LifeandSafekeeping

How brilliantly Rebecca McClanahan marries New York to the country of her life and imagination, thus recreating the city. One lives with her in this beautifully-wrought memoir as one lives in a New York apartmenthearing the neighbors breathe, inhaling the tense air, scanning the prairies of the streets, and greeting the mysteries of strangers as though no one has ever seen such things before. Play each scene as if it were new, she quotes her teachers, who she says are dead. Yet their words live here. Its no easy feat to make New York new. This writer does it wondrously.Roger Rosenblatt,New York Timesbestselling author ofMaking ToastandThe Boy Detective: A New York Childhood

This bookby turns witty, thought-provoking, and movinginvites the reader to reflect on urban life in contemporary America. A keen observer of much that often passes unnoticed, this writer inspires us to reconsider the meaning of the insignificant events and circumstances of our own lives.Kathleen Norris,New York Timesbestselling author ofDakota: A Spiritual GeographyandThe Cloister Walk

The 9/11 essays in Rebecca McClanahansIn the Key of New York Cityare wondrous, evoking the rich vibrancy of life in the city even as horrific events shadow the horizon. McClanahan, one of the finest practitioners of the creative essay in America today, daringly weaves the city and its creatures into a memorable and resilient testament: the world was changed, but New York endures.David H. Lynn, Editor, theKenyon Review

"Rebecca McClanahansIn the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essaysfrom Red Hen Press, offers a timeless portrait of New Yorks contradictions, which is to say, it provides a salve to the upheaval of now and acts as a reminder of the citys constancy throughout tribulations...New Yorks literary bones would appreciate this books structure, which mirrors McClanahans existence: larger, contemplative essays intersperse with brief, interstitial studies of people, moments, and objects, just as her long stretches alone are punctuated by walks in the park or rides on the subway...Far be it from me to announce anything definitive about a place like New York that defies categories. But there is this: no matter where we live, we are all, in our own ways, students of loneliness and suffering. But we are also students of beauty and imagination. In the Key of New York City tells us that both songs, sung at the same time, define what it is to be human."Cate Hodorowicz,PANK Magazine

"Rebecca McClanahansIn the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essaysis an exploration of what it means to live in a place, and, in fact, what it means to live at all. Its a haunting book, with many detailed glimpses into the everyday realities of apartment-dwelling, rent-paying, and meaning-making in a city thats at once glorious and difficult."Vivian Wagner,Brevity

"McClanahan has ordered these essays so their themes and motifs echo and build. This is what I hunger for: Books in which I sense the writer has taken her time to show readers how language and meaning are carefully craftedespecially when language and meaning are refocused via revision."Tarn Wilson,

"Throughout these essays, she demonstrates the art of interpreting people through body language, actions, and the hints they leave in the marginalia of library books. She tunes into the undercurrents of human relations to modulate between the personal and social, tragic and laughable, profound and quotidian. She writes large and small the context of culture that will never be the same again. This memoir brings her life to lightand with it the lives of lonely people on park benches, revelers in Paul Newmans return to Broadway, and children who lost their parents in the downed towers. It is a life-affirming account of the richness of our responses to hardship, alienation, sickness, and success."Amy Wright,KENYONreview

Author Bio

Rebecca McClanahan, author of ten books, has received two Pushcart Prizes, the Glasgow Award in nonfiction, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry magazine, and four fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, the Georgia Review, the Kenyon Review, the Sun, and in anthologies published by Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, Norton, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Bedford/St. Martins, and numerous others. She teaches in the MFA programs of Queens University and Rainier Writing Workshop and lives with her husband, video producer Donald Devet, in Charlotte, North Carolina.