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V. Smart
July 21, 2008
I’m always a sucker for a fish-out-of-water story, which is why I usually like the novels of Diane Johnson. But a fish-out-of-water memoir to a memoiraholic like me, well, that’s even better. And now, one in which the fish is American and the new water is veddy British: well, what else is there?.
That’s why I loved Sarah Lyall’s collection of essays just out from Norton called The Anglo Files. It’s by the New York Times reporter who up and married a British publisher, relocated to London, produced two very British daughters who often confound their New Yorker mother by asking if “this trouser goes with this jumper.” (“Where did you come from,?” Lyall tells me she wants to ask them.)
But what I love about Lyall’s book is that it’s not all memoir; a longtime newspaper person, she says she felt more comfortable writing other stories than her own, and so the book transcends me-me-me. For every anecdote – about, say, her British friends’ tendency to offer alcohol to everyone over the age of 12 at virtually any hour of the day – there’s a factoid or a piece of history, like the one about how the incidence of alcohol related liver disease in the UK has doubled in the past decade. And there’s usually a wry comment, as well: “Drunken Brits are one of the country’s most visible exports,” she writes.
See what I mean? You gotta love her.
How the book will fare in the UK is a question, of course, and Lyall admits to some fear about its reception in the press (especially since one of chapters concerns the British tabloid industry: she is not a fan). “I’m not sure I’ll ever completely feel like I belong here,” she says. The Brits, apparently, still think there’s something faintly unseemly about being an American, let alone an American who reveals her feelings . Still, there are advantages to being a colonial. “If you happen to behave stupidly,” says Lyall, “you always have an out. You can just say, ‘I’m American, I don’t know any better.’”
Posted by Sara Nelson on July 21, 2008 | Comments (4)
