In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays
In this lively and deeply affecting memoir, Rebecca McClanahan tracks the heartbeat of New York as only a stunned newcomer can: in overheard conversations on park benches, songs and cries sifted through apartment walls, and in encounters with street people dispensing unexpected wisdom. Having uprooted their settled lives in North Carolina to pursue a long-held dream of living in Manhattan, she and her husband struggle to find jobs, forge friendships, and create a home in a city of strangers. The 9/11 attacks and a serious cancer surgery complicate their story, merging the public with the private, the present with the past, to shape a journey richer than either could have imagined.
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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. Martin's, 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.
"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 Times bestselling author of A Three Dog Life and Safekeeping
"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 apartment--hearing 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. It's no easy feat to make New York new. This writer does it wondrously." --Roger Rosenblatt, New York Times bestselling author of Making Toast and The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood
"This book--by turns witty, thought-provoking, and moving--invites 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 Times-bestselling author of Dakota: A Spiritual Geography and The Cloister Walk
"The 9/11 essays in Rebecca McClanahan's In the Key of New York City are 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, the Kenyon Review
"Rebecca McClanahan's In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays from Red Hen Press, offers a timeless portrait of New York's contradictions, which is to say, it provides a salve to the upheaval of now and acts as a reminder of the city's constancy throughout tribulations...New York's literary bones would appreciate this book's structure, which mirrors McClanahan's 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 McClanahan's In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays is an exploration of what it means to live in a place, and, in fact, what it means to live at all. It's a haunting book, with many detailed glimpses into the everyday realities of apartment-dwelling, rent-paying, and meaning-making in a city that's at once glorious and difficult."--Vivian Wagner,
