Melissa Holbrook Pierson

The Place You Love Is Gone

“Smart and defiant. . . . Rich with characters and anecdote and heart. . . . A great success.”—Anthony Swofford, New York Times Book Review

Has the future—ever more people with their houses, stores, roads, and sprawl—been wrecking your past? Melissa Holbrook Pierson, with unalloyed insight, elucidates how it feels to lose that landscape of home. In the past twenty years, like countless towns it resembles, Akron, Ohio, has lost its singularity, and much of what native-daughter Pierson loves about it. She then moves to Hoboken, New Jersey, a forgotten appendage of New York—until stockbrokers discover it. Finally, she speaks of rural areas, telling of the thousands of upstate New Yorkers displaced by city reservoirs.

A unique book uniquely of our moment: This is what it feels like to lose the place you love.

“As deeply felt as it is intellectually wide-ranging, this book allows us to listen in on a fascinating, cultivated, poetic consciousness as it chews on the big and small issues of place and self.”—Phillip Lopate