Author explores the coexistence, concept of home, family and place
Megan Harlan reflects on a childhood that put her in 17 houses, from Saudi Arabia to Marin
Megan Harlan didn’t give a lot of thought to her unusual childhood until she became a mother 13 years ago. The more she wrote in her journal, reflecting on having to move 17 times across four continents as a child, the more she found herself awash in feelings.
Where was her home? What is home, anyway? How are we defined by it? How do we reconcile a desire for security and freedom? What does it means to belong somewhere?
She explores those questions and more in “Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays” (University of Georgia Press), due out Sept. 15. The collection of 10 essays melding cultural histories, psychology and personal stories won an award for creative writing from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs.
“When I had a kid, I didn’t think it would change my perspective all that much, but it really profoundly did. This idea (of) making a home for him — it was like an instinct that really kicked in,” she said from her Mediterranean-style Berkeley home. She and her husband bought it six months after their son was born, determined to give him the rootedness she so desperately longed for when she was young. “I didn’t see it coming. And it just cast my whole childhood in a new light.”
Now, in the midst of a global pandemic, “home” has taken on new meaning as stay-at-home orders have changed our relationship to our homes and the people we share those four walls with. Meanwhile, wildfires and hurricanes have forced tens of thousands to flee their residences.
“When I was growing up, I was sort of trained (for) situations where I had to be in a place for a certain amount of time that I knew was temporary, but wasn’t necessarily comfortable. So I kind of rolled with (the lockdown) for a while,” Harlan said. “At this point, I’m really wanting to explore this extreme homebody-ness we’re all experiencing. … Even if we want to leave, we can’t. It’s very intense.”
Things are intense now, but as a child, it wasn’t easy to move once a year or so, as her family followed her father’s work. He was a civil engineer for massive engineering and building projects all over the world, from Saudi Arabia to London, the Alaskan tundra, a Colombian jungle and Marin County.
“My parents viewed address as an easily remedied accident, chased locational adventures like they were game, wielded an unshakeable curiosity in this world’s many forms, thought best on their feet. What they couldn’t do was stop, and stay healthy. That is what a nomad is. What I am,” she writes. “In my own nomadic family, my parents viewed their children as the world that mattered most, and as long as we were all together, our location was mere detail.”
Harlan arrived in Marin when she was 15. Her family bought a Likeler, a 1960sera knock-off of the famed Eichler houses, in Terra Linda.
In her essay, “Likelers,” Harlan explores the history of Eichlers, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Center and 1980s Marin, when on any given day, there was a good chance of running into Huey Lewis, Steve Perry and Grace Slick.”
“It was really exciting as a 15-year-old who is kind of an artist at heart,” said Harlan, now 50. “Marin opened up this culture of art to me.”
Before moving into the
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Likeler, her family toured a real Eichler, which had been turned into a “lava lamp in house form, a stage-set for acid trips circa 1968,” she writes. It had vibrantly colored walls, Grateful Dead Dancing Bears stickers fused into the atrium’s glass, turquoise shag rugs and an overwhelming smell of “incense.” It was the first time Harlan says she saw her mother, or anyone, cry over a house.
Her family bought the Likeler fully intending to fix and flip it, which they did. Still, she writes, “When I ask my mom about the Likeler today, to my surprise she says quietly, ‘I wish we could have stayed there.’”
Harlan doesn’t have that same connection; of
all the places she lived, the Likeler is the one she found excuses to leave as often as possible.
Kirkus Reviews notes that her “graceful” essays are “sharply observed forays into the mazes of the past.”
Harlan hopes her book gets people to think a little deeper about their own relationship to home. While she’s grateful for the experiences
of living all over the world, Harlan hopes to give her son similar experiences but through different means.
“It really has given me a perspective of the world that’s so much wider,” she said. “But as a parent, I want my own kid to have that comfort in different cultures, but not have to question his own place in the world.”