In 3quarksdaily

Notes From a Suburban Flâneur (Excerpt)

Countless young Americans flee the suburbs to the cities as soon as they are able. Indeed, a longing to get away is almost the cornerstone of suburban fictions, from April Wheeler, the bored housewife in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961), daydreaming of a move to Paris, to the teenage sisters in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999), reading glossy travel magazines as they dream of escape. My story is in some ways the opposite. I grew up in West London and spent my teenage weekends taking the Piccadilly Line into Leicester Square to try to get into god-awful nightclubs using homemade fake IDs, all the while longing for the night to be over so I could go home to my pyjamas and books (years later, Swedish singer Lykke Li would perfectly capture my teenage experience with her lyrics: Though my jeans are too tight, Don’t feel like dancing, And all this light is too bright, Don’t feel like shining… Everybody’s dancing, I don’t want to). My teenage longings were chiefly informed by the American film and TV that I thirstily consumed. To me, it seemed that Winnie from The Wonder Years and Joey Potter from Dawson’s Creek had it all: boy-next-door romances, the freedom to bicycle those wide suburban roads, jetties on which to dangle their legs and think. I grant, then, that an additional part of the charm of the American suburbs for me is no doubt a function of my teenage televisual forays: I walk not only in the landscape around me but also in the dreamscape of my youth. 

But I don’t think that’s the whole story. 

Read the full piece here.