The surprising things I really love about life in America
Moving to a new country has been harder and stranger than I imagined, but these are the things about my new(ish) life I love and value
You are always talking about England, someone said to me recently, and it’s very obvious how much you love it.
It wasn’t an observation. It was a criticism. There was salt in his tone which made me smart a little bit. I’m not, in any way, hiding my love for England; my last book The Giant on the Skyline is about what home feels like, in a deep and profound way, when memory, time and longing collide. I wanted to write aboutthat specific place of internal yearning for home we all carry with us in some way, but it’s also about my love for rural England. In the book I also tried to convey a sense of the overlapping layers of recent and ancient history, combined with myths and legend, which contribute to that sense of bright green mystical England.
And what this person said wasn’t wrong: when I look back at images of the week we spent in England in September, of selfies I took in the rain with my daughter’s in a field with the horses, or up on the Ridgeway in the wind with my younger children, I recognise inside me a kind of internal glimmer, or perhaps possession of, and by, place which I feel most absolutely when I’m standing in a field in the rain in England. Coming to live in America has been so interesting in so many ways, but one that I wasn’t expecting was to be able to see England from a distance. I’m not ashamed of my love for England; in fact, I feel quite vocal about it, especially right now, when so many people seem so down on the place, running down the NHS without recognising what an absolutely dazzling gift it is, especially when you’ve come face to face with the alternative and grappled with the true horrors of medical insurance, or disparaging Kier for a few Taylor Swift tickets when his predecessors got rich and fat on dodgy PPE contracts and a culture of lies. I even feel quite defensive about the weather. Yes, the weather! I know, I know it rains a lot! Especially in the last few months! I know, I really do, that it’s grey a lot of the time! But there aren’t, at least at the moment, tornadoes to contend with, and it never gets so hot in the summer that AC is even necessary. Try four months of intense humidity and temperatures in the high nineties, and suddenly a drizzly England summer seems like heaven.
Look, I love England. I really, really love it, and it will always be my home, the place I long for, and feel a bit bereft to be separated from.
But I’m running away with myself here, because this week I didn’t want to write about England. Instead, I want to tell you about some of the things love about America, this big, bold, wild country, which often, always in fact, defies definition. There are so many versions of what it means to be “American”, and just when I think I’m understanding this, I turn around and see a new view, a new cultural collision, which undoes every certainty I felt I’d reached.
When we see America from a distance, for example from England, it’s easy to think of this country as “like a film.” This is of course inevitable since most of us have imbued huge, huge quantities of American culture through the films, music, books, as well as, more recently, pod casts and social media feeds, we all choose to consume. But “America”, I’m learning since moving here, is a much, much bigger, wilder, weirder, more diverse, more strange, more surprising, more confusing, more indefinable place than anything you might have seen in a movie.
I’ve been open and honest about the things I’ve found hard about moving here, because relocating to a new country is a very, very challenging thing to do. It’s a bit like having a baby, or processing grief: until it happens to you, you cannot really comprehend the specific and strange and hard - very hard - emotions it brings with it. Sometimes, the feeling of being an outsider, or misunderstood, or simply just a bit lonely, or longing for home, can be totally and completely overwhelming. I was talking to someone in England about it when they told me, rather bossily, that they knew exactly what America was like since they’d been on many holidays there, and I resisted the urge to laugh at their confidence. America of the holidays, or the movies, is not like America of everyday life. Someone else asked me if it was like an endless holiday, and the answer is a resounding no. Don’t even say that. It’s not like a holiday. Normal life goes on, but without any of the usual sources of support (friends, community, ritual, even familiar food or places or sensations of daily life) we innately and subconsciously lean into.
I have moved to America in very privileged circumstances - we have a home, jobs, a car, (quite) good schools - and I live here with the knowledge I will go back to England, but this experience has broadened my understanding of what it means to be displaced, whoever and wherever you are. I am going to stress again - I know I am privileged, and I am not comparing my circumstances to those who move or are forced to move due to very different, very much less privileged circumstances. However, I’m naturally curious about human life, and what the different versions of it feel like. Now, when I speak to any immigrant, I feel a stronger sense of empathy, a greater feeling of allegiance, of a shared, if not experienced, emotion. I find myself, again and again, having rich, deeply connected conversations with the Ethiopian Uber driver about how he really feels living here for two decades, or the Ukrainian store owner what she misses most about her local cooking, or the Palestinian waiter about what home really means to him. These are almost always, for obvious reasons, very sad conversatons, full of poetry and longing. As one Uber driver said to me recently, who had moved to America from Addis Ababa two decades ago, “I know this country well now and have made my home here, but every day, I wake up and I feel strange.” It was the best description of the strange feeling of displacement that living in a foreighn country gives you I’ve ever heard.
But while we all carry a longing for home, even those who’ve been here many, many years, there are parts of American life I truly adore. So here are my ten things I love about America in no particular order - with an explanation of what makes each so brilliant - and so different to the UK. I’m sure they’ll change again in a few months, as my experiences deepen here, but this is what I’m feeling right now.
I love the way American’s find any reason to celebrate national holidays and saints days, and decorate the outside of their houses to reflect this. I’m not just talking about Halloween, although I personally love the pumpkins and spiders that have been finding their ways onto the outside of houses since mid September. I find some of the Halloween decorations a bit too macabre, like hanging body bags or bloody sheets on lawns, but there are enough simple celebrations of harvest decorating many, many of the houses I pass every day, as much as halloween, to ignore these. This point in the year is a celebration of fall, as much as anything, and I love the scarecrows and wreaths of orange leaves lots of people decorate their houses with, as much as the skeletons the size of houses, which are dramatic and yes, quite funny. But Halloween’s just one part of this, and will now ease us into the real holiday season, which starts of course with Thanksgiving. We spent last Thanksgiving with a new American friend who explained that to many Americans, this national holiday is the start of “the holiday season” which runs until New Year, and is more than anything an excuse to get together with friends and family and eat and drink and be together, as often as possible, from late November to early January. I loved this idea, and it takes the emphasis off Christmas day being the one “big day”. Of course, no-one holds back when it comes to Christmas decorations either. Life-size light-up sleigh complete with nodding reindeer? Absolutely! An entire garden covered in glittery candy canes surrounding a larger-than-life-size nativity scene? Bring it on! And while we are about it, let’s not forget giant inflatable hearts and pink lights for Valentines’s day, green glittery shamrocks lighting up lawns on St Patrick’s Day and lots and lots and lots of red, white and blue lights and flags for 4th July. There are many, many other celebrations I’m missing here, but these have been some of my favourite so far.