What is *Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays* by Megan Harlan about?

*Mobile Home* explores Megan Harlan’s nomadic childhood across 17 homes on four continents—from Alaska to Saudi Arabia—interweaving personal stories with cultural histories of place. Through ten linked essays, it examines themes of family, addiction, and the fluid concept of "home," blending memoir with insights into nomadic traditions, suburban housing, and architectural landmarks.

Who should read *Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays*?

Fans of literary memoirs, travel writing, or unconventional family narratives will appreciate this book. It resonates with readers interested in themes of identity, belonging, and how environments shape personal growth. Critics praise its elegant prose and rich research, making it ideal for lovers of hybrid memoir-essay forms.

What are the main themes in *Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays*?

Key themes include the malleability of "home," the impact of constant relocation on identity, and familial legacies of addiction and creativity. Harlan contrasts her mother’s obsession with renovating houses against her father’s wanderlust, while exploring global nomadic traditions and modern mobility.

How does Megan Harlan connect personal stories to cultural history in *Mobile Home*?

Harlan juxtaposes her family’s experiences with broader cultural contexts, such as Bedouin nomadism, trailer-park communities, and the symbolism of landmarks like Stonehenge. These connections highlight how personal and collective understandings of place intersect.

What role do Harlan’s parents play in shaping *Mobile Home*?

Her mother’s relentless home renovations and her father’s alcoholism-fueled wanderlust drive the memoir’s exploration of rootlessness. Their contrasting approaches to "home" frame Harlan’s reflections on stability and transience.

How does *Mobile Home* address the concept of identity?

The memoir portrays identity as shaped by displacement, arguing that belonging is a creative act rather than a fixed location. Harlan’s global upbringing underscores how adaptability and memory forge selfhood.

What criticisms exist about *Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays*?

Some reviewers note a tension between meticulous research and emotional reserve, with one essay critiqued for prioritizing historical detail over deeper familial vulnerability. However, most praise its originality and lyrical prose.

How does *Mobile Home* compare to other travel memoirs?

Unlike linear travel narratives, Harlan’s essayistic structure layers geography with introspection, offering a fragmented yet cohesive meditation on place. It stands out for blending autobiography with architectural and anthropological insights.

Mobile Home

A Memoir in Essays

Megan Harlan

4.63(160 Reviews)

Overview of Mobile Home

In "Mobile Home," award-winning author Megan Harlan transforms her nomadic childhood across seventeen homes on four continents into a lyrical exploration of belonging. Critics compare her to Annie Dillard, praising how she redefines "home" beyond physical spaces. What anchors us when everything keeps changing?

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Chapter 1

Nomadic Roots: The Architecture of Belonging

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in seventeen different homes across four continents before turning seventeen? Megan Harlan's memoir "Mobile Home" explores this extraordinary childhood experience with stunning clarity and insight. Named one of the New York Times' most anticipated memoirs of 2020, this collection of interconnected essays has captivated readers with its exploration of what "home" truly means when you've never stayed in one place long enough to find out. Praised by Cheryl Strayed as "a brilliant meditation on belonging," Harlan's work resonates deeply in our increasingly mobile society. The book won the prestigious AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction, with judge Debra Monroe noting its "elegant, associative thinking" that transforms personal experience into universal insight. What makes this memoir particularly fascinating is how it speaks to the growing phenomenon of "third culture kids" - children raised in cultures different from their parents' - a demographic that has exploded with globalization but remains underexplored in literature.

Chapter 2

The Nomad's Perspective: Moving Through Worlds

Unlike traditional nomads who follow seasonal patterns around ancestral territories, Harlan's family moved on average once a year across seventeen homes on four continents before she turned seventeen. Her father's engineering jobs on massive construction projects compressed vast distances into five-hour flights, weaving together disparate cultures, languages, and landscapes. From the scorching deserts of Saudi Arabia to the misty highlands of Scotland, each transition brought radical shifts in climate, culture, and daily rhythms. This perpetual movement created a unique perspective in young Megan - one lacking a solid middle distance, where only the very near (inside her head) or very vast ("London," "astronomy," "poetry") felt tangible. The intermediate world of neighborhood relationships, local customs, and community ties remained perpetually out of reach. This nomadic existence continues an American tradition of westward movement, though with a modern, global twist. Harlan's ancestors fled Europe centuries ago, pushed ever westward until her parents leaped from the Pacific coast to Saudi Arabia, transforming the traditional frontier into an international odyssey. The family lived mostly out of cardboard boxes in various stages of being packed and unpacked - boxes meticulously managed by her homemaker mother while her frequently absent father was "at work." These boxes, labeled and relabeled with different destinations, told a rambling story without classical arc, depicting an American family whose possessions kept moving without explanation, cause, or effect. Each box became both anchor and sail, containing fragments of past lives while facilitating movement toward future ones. For nomads, the sky becomes a room - an obvious yet profound presence that magnifies when you live on the move. It frames your sense of freedom, exposure, and safety, offering the special promise that freedom is safety. The night sky inspired Bedouin stellar poetry, where lyricism merges with logistics - constellations unfurl ever-changing maps of time and travel, telling nomads when to move. Ancient desert travelers used Polaris and the Southern Cross as their compass points, just as Harlan's family tracked their movements through airport codes and flight paths. This connection to the vast and open contrasts sharply with the Western notion of home as a fixed, enclosed space, challenging conventional ideas about belonging and stability. Harlan's parents viewed their children as the world that mattered most, believing their togetherness outweighed location. They saw each move as an educational opportunity, each new country as another chapter in their children's development. But they never questioned whether moving multiple times in a school year might harm their development or if constant displacement could fragment their sense of identity. They assumed their children could carry the kaleidoscopic wonders of their travels anywhere, assembling them around themselves like the emperor's invisible clothes - a portable tapestry of experiences that could substitute for roots. This assumption - that home is portable and that family bonds could compensate for geographical instability - forms the central tension of Harlan's nomadic childhood, raising questions about the true nature of belonging in an increasingly mobile world.

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Chapter 3

Mobile Homes: The Architecture of Impermanence

As a child, Harlan's family lived in three trailer homes across dramatically different environments: Alaskan tundra, Arabian desert, and South American jungle. These were company housing in construction compounds, where everyone lived in identical trailers, creating unwitting experiments in socialist housing. Despite extreme temperatures ranging from -40F in Alaska to 120F in Arabia, the double-wides proved remarkably functional, fitting three bedrooms, a full kitchen, two bathrooms, and all modern conveniences into a thousand square feet. The standardized design demonstrated surprising adaptability across these harsh climates, with only minor modifications needed for insulation and cooling. In Saudi Arabia in 1978, their family moved into a Bechtel compound trailer that resembled an Albuquerque trailer park, complete with gravel yards and chain-link fences. As an eight-year-old, Harlan adored their double-wide - it fit like a correctly sized shoe, offering familiar comfort in an unfamiliar land. Her mother transformed the standard-issue interior into a personalized sanctuary, layering Persian carpets from local souks, displaying treasures from their global travels, while Ethiopian coffee ceremonies filled the rooms with rich aromas. These American-made homes from Indiana, with their aluminum siding and manufactured precision, created their sense of being transient Others in a foreign land, while simultaneously providing a consistent thread through their nomadic existence. Mobile homes exist in a fascinating paradox across American society - from $1.9 million Malibu double-wides with ocean views to $20,000 Craigslist finds in rural communities, housing 20 million Americans of vastly different economic circumstances - yet they remain largely excluded from serious architectural discourse and canon. These quintessentially American dwellings, the only housing type truly indigenous to non-native United States, perfectly embody our contradictory cultural values: we celebrate mobility and freedom of movement while simultaneously fearing its social implications and stigmatizing those who embrace it. When Le Corbusier famously called a home "a machine for living in," he wasn't simply prescribing mechanization but acknowledging the inherent motion present in all dwelling. Our experience of place is always in flux as we move through time, our needs and circumstances evolving. A good home doesn't stifle but allows movement through life as desired, adapting to changing family sizes, economic conditions, and personal aspirations. This perspective fundamentally challenges our conventional understanding of home as a fixed, immutable space, suggesting instead that impermanence might be a feature rather than a flaw. Mobile homes, in their very design and conception, embrace this philosophy of adaptability and change, even when they remain parked in one location for decades.

Chapter 4

The Spaces Between: Motel Childhoods and Temporary Living

When Harlan was six, she moved into a Los Angeles motel with her mother and little brother. For six weeks they lived on the second floor, with a window overlooking a Denny's and a freeway wall. Palm trees drooped over the parking lot where cars shifted in ever-changing patterns, their metallic bodies catching the California sun like mirrors. Her mother no longer had a car - it had been sold weeks before along with most of their possessions. They arrived by taxi, their belongings condensed into four suitcases, and would leave the same way. During the 1976 bicentennial, Denny's flickered with miniature American flags and red-white-and-blue bunting. This is where her family ate every meal, three times a day, becoming as familiar with the vinyl booths as their own motel beds. The blonde waitress, Betty, greeted them daily with a knowing smile, understood they should be in school but weren't, and brought silver dollar pancakes without asking - piled high with powdered sugar that yellowed with butter and formed sticky pools on the plate. Betty became their anchor to the outside world, the only person who acknowledged their temporary existence with any regularity. She would slip extra bacon onto their plates and pretend not to notice when Harlan's brother built towers with the cream containers. Their Space Age motel, with its angular architecture and atomic-inspired signage, provided only bare necessities - two double beds, a bathroom with thin towels, and a TV that picked up three channels through its rabbit ears. It felt like a space station for travelers bending time with their journeys, suspended between past and future. The family awaited relocation to Iran, then suddenly Saudi Arabia instead, before dozens more global destinations would reshape their lives. Harlan's mother hated waiting, trapped in this limbo between worlds, her diplomatic career pulling them across continents like pieces on a chess board. In the motel room, her mother collapsed like a dying star, her usual dynamic energy imploding into endless pacing, unpacking, repacking - perpetual motion that resulted in nothing but worn carpet paths. The enormous force within her scaled down to a diminished figure reading by nightstand light, chain-smoking Marlboros and making whispered phone calls to embassies and officials. Harlan read too, losing herself in library books about normal children with permanent addresses, while her brother raced Hot Wheels cars through makeshift cities built from phone books and soap boxes. Outside their window, cars shot across the freeway too fast to know anything about them, yet they constantly witnessed their existence, their headlights drawing light trails across the darkness like shooting stars. These transitional spaces - motels, airport terminals, temporary housing - become significant markers in the nomadic child's experience. They represent the liminal spaces between destinations, the pauses between movements that paradoxically come to feel more real than the destinations themselves. In these spaces, identity becomes fluid, belonging becomes temporary, and home becomes wherever you happen to be sleeping that night. The motel room becomes both nowhere and everywhere, a universal way station in the geography of displacement.

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Chapter 5

London Calling: A Child's Eye View of History

In January 1977, Harlan moved from Los Angeles to a fancy London hotel suite with her mother and brother for two months until they ran out of money. They left for Saudi Arabia in March, then returned in September with her father to a posh Kensington Square flat for six months. London appeared and disappeared like an ambitious theater production, a network of tunnels leading through time, colored Underground lines mapping their journeys. London in 1977 celebrated the Queen's Silver Jubilee, her crowned head emblazoned on everything from buses to teacups. At the Tower of London, Harlan's mother recounted royal executions, and Megan instantly adored Anne Boleyn for ordering her beheading sword from France's finest craftsman - her first lesson in quality when it counts. Standing at the chopping block with her guidebook, she breathed in London's distinctive smell of wet stone and traffic fumes, realizing for the first time that the brief span of decency through which her family moved was an anomaly in the grinding cruelty of human history. With no friends in London and no school, Harlan turned outward to the city itself. Her extroverted nature twisted toward the public sphere - Roman street plans, medieval maps, Renaissance windows, black cabs. Here she learned about "culture" and its counterpart, "counterculture." That year, London's counterculture exploded with the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and other bands inspired by a few storefronts on King's Road. London became "bunk buses," as her four-year-old brother called the double-deckers that looked like enchanted vehicles to fairy villages. With no spending money, her mother took them to a bookstore where they browsed for hours, buying nothing. She discovered "Timothy and Two Witches," about magical London townhouses divided by good and evil - a book that became a lifelong favorite. For Harlan, London represented the first place where the world became truly visible. After living in three massive American states that function nearly as countries unto themselves, she encountered a place that knew it's no longer what matters most in the world. Here she learned what an "American" is - something you can only grasp after leaving the United States: loud, provincial yet ambitious, ignorant yet shrewd.

Chapter 6

The Eichler Dream: California Modernism and the Middle Class

At fifteen, Harlan moved with her family to Terra Linda in Marin County - a modest enclave in otherwise affluent San Rafael. This unassuming suburb boasted two architectural claims to fame: Frank Lloyd Wright's surreal Marin County Civic Center, with its distinctive blue roof and golden spire piercing the California sky, and one of the largest collections of Eichler homes, which would come to define post-war suburban modernism. Joseph Eichler, a Wright devotee and visionary developer, revolutionized California architecture by mass-producing modernist houses for middle-class buyers. Driven by philosophy over profit, Eichler believed modernism's streamlined sensibility was inherently democratic - he even refused to "redline" by race or ethnicity at a time when such discriminatory practices were commonplace in American suburbia. His developments were among the first to actively welcome minority buyers, making him a quiet pioneer of housing integration. By the 1980s, however, these once-coveted homes were considered dated, their flat roofs prone to leaking and their single-pane windows energy inefficient. Terra Linda also contained hundreds of knock-offs dubbed "Likelers" - one of which became Harlan's sixteenth home. During their house hunt, they toured a genuine Eichler that brought her mother to tears. The flat-roofed, single-story "shoebox" revealed itself as a psychedelic time capsule inside - walls painted in kaleidoscopic hues adorned with cartoonish murals of mushrooms, dragons, and naked figures. The original mahogany paneling had been painted over in deep purples and electric blues, while the signature floor-to-ceiling windows were partially obscured by hanging beads and macrame. This collision of two American dreams fascinated Harlan: Eichler's standardized modernism for enlightened middle-class professionals, hijacked by unbridled hippie self-expression. Joseph Eichler discovered his calling after renting Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian-style Bazett House during World War II. At forty-eight, unemployed after decades as a produce salesman, Eichler was transformed by the home's emotional power. The sleek design with flat roof, clerestory windows, skylights and glass walls made him feel content yet energized through three visceral pleasures: light, nature, and privacy. The house's open floor plan and seamless indoor-outdoor flow created a living experience that would influence his future developments. Inspired to democratize Wright's supposedly "middle-class" modernism, Eichler developed affordable homes using post-and-beam construction that allowed walls to be built of inexpensive materials like plywood and Philippine mahogany paneling. Inside, these stark jewel-boxes of natural light featured glass walls opening onto landscaped backyards or central atriums - recalling Moorish and Spanish Mexican housing with plain exteriors concealing beautiful interiors. His signature features included radiant floor heating, exposed beams, and floor-to-ceiling windows that brought the outdoors in. Between 1949 and 1974, Eichler's company built over 11,000 homes in California, creating communities that embodied his vision of accessible modern design for the masses.

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Chapter 7

A Father's Legacy: Alcoholism and Connection

Unlike stereotypical alcoholic father stories, Harlan genuinely liked her father and felt he liked her. During his sober years, they enjoyed a respectful, fond relationship - listening to music, taking drives, sharing good conversations. Then he began drinking again and couldn't stop. In seventh grade, after her father completed six weeks at an alcoholism treatment center, Harlan attended Alakids meetings while her parents went to AA and Alanon. She resented having to share family secrets with strangers, especially since her experience seemed mild compared to other children's horror stories of violent, unemployed alcoholic fathers. After thirteen years of sobriety, her father relapsed while working on an engineering project in Algeria. A severe ear infection left him with deafness in one ear, hearing impairment in the other, and debilitating tinnitus. Placed on disability and fearing the loss of his career, he began drinking heavily. Though close to her father, Harlan rejects the "Daddy's Girl" label as creepy, questioning what healthy father-daughter relationships should look like outside traditional patriarchal frameworks. She critiques cultural depictions that reduce daughters to princesses seeking daddy's approval and fathers to checkbook-wielding grumblers. Instead, she proposes a different model: father as ally and strategist, helping daughters navigate a world often stacked against them. Her father gifted her a Beatles cassette in seventh grade, carefully handwritten with song titles in his distinctive script. They shared a love for "Hey Jude," which her father analyzed as breaking musical rules through its repetition and hypnotic finale - essentially teaching her about "the mechanics of joy." They bonded over MTV and alternative music videos, particularly British post-punk bands. In a rare, precise dream, Harlan encounters her father in a dreamscape city that's part Manhattan, part Paris, part moonstone. She joyfully reunites with him after not seeing him for two years since he'd lost his health, career, and started drinking again. In the dream, they simply enjoy each other's company at an outdoor cafe. The next morning, she receives the devastating call that her father had died alone in his Lake Tahoe house.

Chapter 8

Artifacts of Time: What Remains When We Move On

Harlan recounts treasure-hunting expeditions with her family in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province desert, searching not for jewels but for ancient artifacts along a former incense trade route. With a petrochemical geologist guiding them through the windswept dunes, they collected an array of historical treasures: tarnished Roman coins bearing faint imperial profiles, fragments of intricately decorated Assyrian pottery, weathered stone loom weights smoothed by centuries of sand, and medieval Iraqi potsherds with traces of original glazing still visible. These fragments created a tactile history lesson spanning thousands of years, each piece telling its own story of ancient commerce and civilization. The geologist later shared a remarkable discovery: two enormous ancient storage jars, nearly intact, buried in the desert. These precious artifacts faced dual threats - from Saudi religious extremists who systematically destroy pre-Islamic artifacts in their zeal to erase "idolatrous" history, and from the expanding Bechtel Corporation construction project that employed their team. The jars stood as silent witnesses to the region's rich buried history, particularly the sophisticated civilizations of Dilmun and Gerrha - maritime trading powers that once controlled the Persian Gulf's pearl trade and served as crucial links between Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula. Their existence challenged modern political and religious narratives, demonstrating how "almost everything - but not everything - disappears." The author's family preserved their desert findings with careful attention, wrapping them in vintage yellow paper towels inside 1970s Tupperware containers - preservation materials that have themselves become archaeological artifacts of sorts. Her collection includes stone loom weights worn smooth by time, black chlorite potsherds with distinctive patterns, and delicate glass amphora fragments that once held precious oils or wine. Each piece bears meticulous handwritten notes from her mother, recording locations, estimated ages, and cultural contexts, creating a personal archive of ancient history. These artifacts serve as physical reminders that archaeology saves us from historical certainty and oversimplified narratives. Each piece challenges our assumptions about the past, revealing complex networks of trade, cultural exchange, and human innovation. The objects connect us across vast expanses of time and space, allowing us to touch the same surfaces as traders, craftspeople, and ordinary citizens who lived thousands of years ago. As modern populations shift and scatter like desert sands, these enduring artifacts testify to the true breadth and depth of human habitation, preserving stories that might otherwise be lost to time.

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Chapter 9

The Mystery House: Memory as Architecture

Harlan describes her memory of childhood homes as a single bizarre structure - a mansion with 134 rooms spanning continents, architectural styles, and time periods. This mental house lacks clear boundaries, containing fragments of homes from Latin America, Alaska, Arabia, California, London, and Houston. The spaces shift and connect unpredictably, with corridors breaking off in all directions, creating doorways to different eras and places. She questions why her parents continued changing houses even after returning to America, realizing they treated homes as financial investments for a better "someday." Through their renovation projects, she learned how seemingly solid shelter could be reduced to elemental components - wooden skeletons, ceramic tiles, nails and screws - before being reassembled into order and calm. This cycle repeated endlessly, raising questions about whether her parents were creating something beautiful or simply trying to outrun their anxieties and unwanted pasts. Memory creates an impossible bridge between homes - from her mother boiling water in a Colombian jungle house to gripping the banister in a Houston McMansion, to watching TV with her brother, to her glass-walled Los Gatos hills home where her father reads the newspaper. Her parents built this mansion of houses while religiously tearing it down with each move. For Harlan's family, "home" became a verb, continuously conjugating itself into various tenses. Their constant moves formed a quest toward a mythical destination - the Someday House, the One True Home - a tantalizing legend running alongside their actual lives like a secret corridor waiting to be discovered. This feeling of an elusive destiny is universal, though the pressure her parents felt to discover this perfect home seemed particularly exhausting and quixotic. Her mother would do it all over again - every move had an excellent reason, a logical progression from one home to the next. While Harlan can't see their nomadic life as seamless architecture, her mother can. She describes her old houses in minute detail: the blue paisley wallpaper in Almaden's bathroom, the cream paper with pale yellow roses in her Texas bedroom, the robin's egg blue with tiny flecks in her Vermont nursery. From here, their family's housing history still appears as a maze, ungainly and worryingly large. It may never make sense to her, may not be practical, may even be foolish or tragic. But it is extraordinary - she was raised in someone else's dream home that somehow fit otherness and familiarity, safety and journey under one roof.

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“23 days in and I have used it every single day. It is part of my daily habit now.”

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Key Themes in Mobile Home

third culture kids
nomadic childhood
architecture of belonging
global displacement
transient identity

Quotes from Mobile Home

Freedom is safety.
Togetherness outweighed location.
Home is portable.
Home as a fixed, immutable space.
Impermanence might be a feature rather than a flaw.

Characters in Mobile Home

Megan HarlanThe author and protagonist who lived in 17 homes
Megan Harlan's fatherAn engineer whose global jobs drove the moves
Megan Harlan's motherA homemaker who managed the family's possessions

About the Author

Megan Harlan is the award-winning author of Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays, celebrated for her lyrical exploration of place, identity, and belonging.

A memoir blending travelogue and family history, the book draws from Harlan’s nomadic upbringing across the Middle East, Latin America, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Her debut poetry collection, Mapmaking, won the John Ciardi Prize and was hailed as a “miracle of invention” by poet Alice Fulton.

Harlan’s essays, repeatedly cited in Best American Essays, have appeared in The New York Times, AGNI, and Colorado Review. She holds an MFA from NYU and writes The France House newsletter, chronicling life between California and Brittany.

Mobile Home received the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and the Independent Book Publisher Gold Medal, with The New York Times praising its “big-hearted and thoughtful” prose.

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Chapter 2

Mobile Home

OverviewOverview of Mobile Home

One book. Many ways to hear it.

Nomadic Roots: The Architecture of Belonging

The Nomad's Perspective: Moving Through Worlds

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Mobile Homes: The Architecture of Impermanence

The Spaces Between: Motel Childhoods and Temporary Living

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London Calling: A Child's Eye View of History

The Eichler Dream: California Modernism and the Middle Class

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A Father's Legacy: Alcoholism and Connection

Artifacts of Time: What Remains When We Move On

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The Mystery House: Memory as Architecture

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Key Themes in Mobile Home

Quotes from Mobile Home

Characters in Mobile Home

About the Author

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What is Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays by Megan Harlan about?

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BeFreed Brings Together A Global Community Of Curious Minds

BeFreed Brings Together A Global Community Of Curious Minds

One book. Many ways to hear it.

Nomadic Roots: The Architecture of Belonging

The Nomad's Perspective: Moving Through Worlds

See every word as you hear it

Mobile Homes: The Architecture of Impermanence

The Spaces Between: Motel Childhoods and Temporary Living

Get more out of Mobile Home

London Calling: A Child's Eye View of History

The Eichler Dream: California Modernism and the Middle Class

See every word as you hear it

A Father's Legacy: Alcoholism and Connection

Artifacts of Time: What Remains When We Move On

Get more out of Mobile Home

The Mystery House: Memory as Architecture

You made it to the end of Mobile Home

Users also liked

Discover more

Overview of Mobile Home