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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 ways: in overheard conversations on park benches and subway stations, in songs and cries sifted through apartment walls, in the oil-spilled rainbow colors of the pigeons who mate on the window air conditioner, and in encounters with street people dispensing unexpected wisdom. The 9/11 attacks and a serious cancer surgery turn her attention inward: to memories of marital affairs and separation, the deaths of mentors and friends, and to the books and poems that have always sustained her. Inner and outer landscapes merge, her life touching the lives of the now-familiar strangers. Alternating between brief vignettes and sustained narratives, Rebecca McClanahan tracks the heartbeat of New York, finding in each face she meets the cumulative loss, joy, and stubborn resilience of a city that has claimed her for its own.
"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