Roy Lotz's Reviews > I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

Bill Bryson has become something like my spiritual guide. Taken together, his works form a roadmap for living life as a middle-aged, oversensitive, bookish, misanthropic, curious, and curiously inept man; and I am following his lead into the sunset.

This book was particularly relevant for me, because I recently returned to New York to renew my visa. Like Bryson, I would be seeing my native land after a spell abroad (although my time away was much shorter). As usual, I got the audiobook version so I could savor his delicate voice and charming transatlantic accent. The whole experience warms my heart.

I’m a Stranger Here Myself originated as a newspaper column for a British magazine, written about the trials of moving back to the United States after living his whole adult life in England. As such, this book is more of a collection than a unified whole. The subject jumps from buying fax machines to filing immigration paperwork, from playing ball with his son to gardening with his wife, not to mention thanksgiving, hair cuts, spell checkers, air travel, the economy, and much else.

Strangely enough, the imposed brevity of a newspaper column allows us to see more of Bryson, not less. He mainly writes about whatever is on his mind, and frequently lapses into autobiography. We meet his wife and kids, examine his memories of his childhood, and get a tour of his town. If you like Bryson, this will be delightful; and if not, not.

As far as the ostensible subject goes—and I say ostensible because Bryson often strays from it—I cannot say Bryson quite captures the experience of seeing American culture from a distance. He remarks that people here eat too much, walk too little, and consequently weigh too much. He notes our preoccupation with rules, our predilection for junk food, our reflexively optimistic attitude. To his credit, Bryson presciently condemns American xenophobia and our disastrous ‘War on Drugs’. But in general his observations seem rather superficial. Certainly he is no Tocqueville.

I cannot resist including one of my own observations here. The thing that has most struck me upon moving back is the paranoia. There was a heat wave when I arrived, and everybody was worrying about it. When it gets cold, we’ll worry about that too. My family and friends are all biting their nails about this election. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say that fear has taken over this election season. On the right, they’re worried about immigrants, Muslims, communists, and Clinton; and on the left, we’re mainly worried about the possibility of a Trump presidency. When I turn on the local news I see there’s been a murder in Brooklyn, a man struck by lightning in Queens, and a fire in Manhattan. In other news, there might be something wrong with our water, certain foods might kill you, and certain hair products might cause cancer. And don’t forget that a terrible epidemic is on the horizon.

This example is just to show that Bryson could have gone much further in his cultural analysis. But the book is not meant to be a serious work of cultural criticism, so I suppose it’s unfair to fault a lighthearted collection of newspaper columns for being trivial. The pieces here were not meant to change your life or open your eyes, but to provide a modest dose of entertaining reading. And that’s what they do. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go practice my transatlantic accent.