Cambridge

"It was probably because I was so often taken away from Cambridge when I was young that I loved it as much as I did . . ." London, Florence, Athens: Susanna, a precocious young girl growing up in 1950s Cambridge, would rather be home than in any of these places. Uprooted from the streets around Harvard Square, she feels lost and excluded in all the far-flung cities to which her father's career takes the family. She always comes home with relief-but soon enough wonders if outsiderness may be her permanent condition. Written with a sharp eye for the pretensions-and charms-of the intellectual classes, Cambridge captures the mores of an era now past, the ordinary lives of extraordinary people in a singular part of America, and the ways we can-and cannot-go home.

Susanna Kaysen has written the novels Asa, As I Knew Him and Far Afield and the memoirs Girl, Interrupted and The Camera My Mother Gave Me. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.