What do you think?
Rate this book
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 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.
- GenresMemoir
176 pages, Paperback
Published September 1, 2020
4 people are currently reading
56 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
September 24, 2020
I am a huge fan of Rebecca McClanahan's essays and this new collection did not disappoint. I love the format of this memoir in essays, each piece, adding a different slice or view of a beloved American city and the author's time there. From small, intimate moments - such as an encounter with a homeless man on a Central Park bench - to one person's experience of 9/11 that connects to all of our memories of where we were on that awful day - we enter her unique perspective on life, relationships, the creative process, loneliness and more.
April 13, 2021
This is a wonderful collection of essays comprising a memoir of Rebecca McClanahan’s “midlife move to New York City.” She and her husband had planned “to stay for perhaps two years” and ended up living in the city for more than a decade.
As the light changes over the course of any given day we see the city, along with the author, in rapidly changing perspectives. Images flicker from glorious views of golden ginkgo leaves falling into a glassy Central Park pond,to a dank sidewalk outside the subway station where a demented sufferer screams and spits. The author gradually learns the ways of New York living (do not tell your neighbor that you enjoy his beautiful singing, or you may never hear it again; flowers are cheap but food is dear.)
With each essay we develop a better sense of the author, her capacity for joy and her occasional terrible sadness. She is, it becomes clear, a very hard worker. She’s learned tricks to keep her writing going, like “dressing in my worst clothes” and not combing her hair, so she won’t be tempted to run out for a snack or something to read.
This delightful book makes me wish I were younger and more adventurous, and fills me with admiration for the brave and eloquent author.
As the light changes over the course of any given day we see the city, along with the author, in rapidly changing perspectives. Images flicker from glorious views of golden ginkgo leaves falling into a glassy Central Park pond,to a dank sidewalk outside the subway station where a demented sufferer screams and spits. The author gradually learns the ways of New York living (do not tell your neighbor that you enjoy his beautiful singing, or you may never hear it again; flowers are cheap but food is dear.)
With each essay we develop a better sense of the author, her capacity for joy and her occasional terrible sadness. She is, it becomes clear, a very hard worker. She’s learned tricks to keep her writing going, like “dressing in my worst clothes” and not combing her hair, so she won’t be tempted to run out for a snack or something to read.
This delightful book makes me wish I were younger and more adventurous, and fills me with admiration for the brave and eloquent author.
October 23, 2020
What a delight to read “In The Key of New York City: a memoir in essays” by Rebecca McClanahan. These variegated stories, closely observed from a point of view so fresh—the viewpoint of a consummate wordsmith, a poet—rendered the city where I grew up newly appealing.
I settled comfortably into the 55th Street sublet of Rebecca and husband Donald, middle aged in-movers at the turn of this century, even as Rebecca struggles to adjust to our only-in-New York urban ways. I loved how she subtly makes the city her own, finding the best places in Central Park, quoting the strange things said by loosely-hinged strangers, the odd memorials on park bench plaques. From the half-page “Eighth Avenue Moment” to the deeper dive into cancer surgery called “Shirley, Goodness and Mercy,” each piece plays in its own rich tones.
Together, they make a lovely suite, with orchestration elegant, light and satisfying. For me, this is a near-perfect volume—yet I wanted more. Highly recommended!
I settled comfortably into the 55th Street sublet of Rebecca and husband Donald, middle aged in-movers at the turn of this century, even as Rebecca struggles to adjust to our only-in-New York urban ways. I loved how she subtly makes the city her own, finding the best places in Central Park, quoting the strange things said by loosely-hinged strangers, the odd memorials on park bench plaques. From the half-page “Eighth Avenue Moment” to the deeper dive into cancer surgery called “Shirley, Goodness and Mercy,” each piece plays in its own rich tones.
Together, they make a lovely suite, with orchestration elegant, light and satisfying. For me, this is a near-perfect volume—yet I wanted more. Highly recommended!
December 21, 2022
How has it taken me this long to discover Rebecca McClanahan? Don't answer that.
This book of essays is set in and around the turn of the 21st Century—more specifically, the tragedy of 9/11/01. RM and her husband are relatively new transplants to NYC from North Carolina. She frequently heads to Central Park for solace and solitude amid the cacophony that must have been quite a smack in the face when they landed in a Manhattan sublet.
In the Key of New York City is one of those books where the totality is more than the sum of its parts, er, essays. McClanahan is a poet by trade; one can easily suss that out in the sound of her prose.
Anyway, if you're a fan of contemporary memoir I highly recommend this one.
This book of essays is set in and around the turn of the 21st Century—more specifically, the tragedy of 9/11/01. RM and her husband are relatively new transplants to NYC from North Carolina. She frequently heads to Central Park for solace and solitude amid the cacophony that must have been quite a smack in the face when they landed in a Manhattan sublet.
In the Key of New York City is one of those books where the totality is more than the sum of its parts, er, essays. McClanahan is a poet by trade; one can easily suss that out in the sound of her prose.
Anyway, if you're a fan of contemporary memoir I highly recommend this one.
September 24, 2020
By turns surprising, funny, profound, self-revealing, and deeply moving, this slim volume of essays starts out as a love letter to NY, then takes a turn into the depths. Loaded with precise and quirky observations of the city the southern-based author and her husband relocate to in midlife to repair a rift and start anew—a courageous act in itself. As a reader who's also a writer, I thoroughly enjoyed the author's precise language, wordplay, and recurring, resonant imagery. A profoundly personal, reflective gem of a book.
January 17, 2021
Charming memoir for anyone who loves NYC by a temporary resident. She was there during the 9/11 attacks and captured the mood throughout the city in the weeks after, as well as quite ordinary days in Central Park and her neighborhood on the upper West Side. Not just a diary of 'when I lived in New York,' this is a memoir by a writer who can bring emotion, even meaning, to the mundane. Highly recommended.
September 22, 2020
OK, memoir lovers. Here’s a “memoir in essays” for everyone who loves NYC, everyone who lives there now or who ever lived there, everyone who appreciates intelligent, affecting, original, witty prose. Rebecca McClanahan will captivate you with her vivid and moving memories of the 11 years she lived in Manhattan. Highly recommend!
December 27, 2023
This gorgeous collection is a reminder that even the places that don’t quite feel like home can be home. The author’s treatment of 9-11 is particularly deft and powerful. A beautiful study in sensory details.
March 20, 2022
Every now and then you find a book that causes you to despair as the pages thin and you see the end ahead, wishing it could go on for another hundred pages. Rebecca McClanahan has a way of not just being lyrical and clever in the way she sizes up moments great and small with an insightful turn of phrase, but she also speaks from heart, as if you're her old friend and you've been chatting for hours over a bottle of Chardonnay. McClanahan and her husband, Donald, decide, later in life, to fulfill a dream...live in an apartment in New York City. Who has not had this dream? Once they've moved, they explore all the beauties and miseries of living an urban life: the paper-thin walls, the neighbors who shun a friendly plate of cookies, the walks in Central Park, the theater, the meeting of strangers, and the horrors of the 9/11 attack. These essays are not just connected by place, but by this writer's sharp radar, bringing meaning to the great and small rhythms of New York City...the streets, the hospital, the jury room, and the not-so-quiet apartment that becomes McClanahan's new home. I can't rave enough about this essay collection.
March 15, 2023
When Rebecca McClanahan and her husband sell their beloved house in North Carolina and plunge into the great unknown of a Midtown Manhattan sublet, they're mid-lifers past the supposed age of adventure. Through McClanahan's unflaggingly alert eyes and ears, all New York is an adventure, every minute lit with the reverence of discovery. I woke with her to the "artillery sounds" outside her window marveled with her at falling gingko leaves ("gold coin upon gold coin"), felt her open-hearted determination to save a squirrel whose fight for life happens to coincide with the loss of thousands of lives--and the wound to all our lives--on 9/11. McClanahan finds connections between seemingly disparate things, weaving from her New York minutes a beautifully layered meditation on time, change and mortality--the whole confounding ache of life after youth. Yet this memoir is anything but bleak. McClanahan's brave wit doesn't fail her, even in the face of a cancer diagnosis. Told her future might include a colostomy bag, she tells her anxious father, "I hope not, because it's so hard to find shoes to match."
The writer comes to New York a lonely stranger bewildered by the brusqueness of her neighbors (why don't they want her home-baked cookies or accept her invitations to drop by?). As months and years fly past, she constructs a sense of home, minute by minute. You could inhale this book in one sitting; I chose to linger over images and turns of phrase that amplify one another like voices in a choir (McClanahan sings, and uses music as a leitmotif). The expression "New York minute" will never sound the same.
The writer comes to New York a lonely stranger bewildered by the brusqueness of her neighbors (why don't they want her home-baked cookies or accept her invitations to drop by?). As months and years fly past, she constructs a sense of home, minute by minute. You could inhale this book in one sitting; I chose to linger over images and turns of phrase that amplify one another like voices in a choir (McClanahan sings, and uses music as a leitmotif). The expression "New York minute" will never sound the same.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews