I'm a Stranger Here Myself

In the late summer of 1996, American humorist Bill Bryson, who had lived in Britain for over 20 years, was persuaded by his journalist friend Simon Kelner to write a weekly newspaper column about life in America for the British Mail on Sunday. Bryson had recently relocated with his English wife and four children to Hanover, New Hampshire, a small, friendly college town centered around Dartmouth College, and the columns became a two-year chronicle of his reacquaintance with his native country. Collected in this book, the 70 essays are not a systematic portrait of America but rather observations drawn from Bryson's daily life, tracing an emotional arc from bewilderment and occasional dismay at the strangeness of his homeland to a deep, if still bewildered, affection for it.

The book opens with Bryson describing how returning to one's native land after a long absence feels like waking from a coma. He left America as a youth and returned in middle age, meaning that all the ordinary responsibilities of adult life, such as furnaces and storm windows, were things he had only ever managed in England. He found himself unable to remember American terms for common items at the hardware store, baffled by ATMs, and confused by once-routine tasks like pumping gas. Yet he also rediscovered pleasures he had forgotten: baseball on the radio, fireflies, screen doors slamming in summer, and the boundless friendliness of strangers. He concludes, against earlier expectations, that you can go home again.

The early essays focus on Bryson's encounters with everyday American services and systems. He praises his small-town post office for its efficiency and its annual Customer Appreciation Day, complete with free doughnuts, but was dismayed when a letter he sent to a bookstore in Berkeley, California, was returned after 41 days for an insufficient address. He contrasts British and American attitudes toward medication, noting that Americans spend nearly $75 billion a year on medicines and now see prescription drugs advertised directly to consumers. He satirizes the ordeal of ordering food in restaurants where servers recite incomprehensible specials at length, and he delights in the improbable injury statistics found in the Statistical Abstract of the United States, which reveals that over 400,000 Americans are injured annually by beds, mattresses, or pillows. A recurring theme is Americans' instinctive devotion to rules: Bryson was scolded for seating himself in a nearly empty café and was nearly denied boarding at an airport because his own book, bearing his photograph, was not on the airline's approved list of identification.

Several essays examine the peculiarities of American consumer culture. Bryson traces the history of motels from the 1920s to the homogenized chains of the present and describes a failed attempt to recapture the old-fashioned motel experience that ended with his family defecting to a Comfort Inn. He marvels at the centrality of cupholders in car design (the Dodge Caravan offers 17 for seven passengers) and catalogs the absurdities of mail-order catalogs, including a $139 "Briefcase Valet" designed to hold a briefcase four inches off the floor. He argues that gross domestic product (GDP), the standard measure of economic performance, is deeply flawed, rewarding pollution, illness, and litigation as economic gains.

Domestic life provides rich material. Bryson celebrates the garbage disposal as the pinnacle of American household engineering, testing its limits with chopsticks and cantaloupe rinds. He contrasts his haphazard gardening approach with his English wife's scientific expertise, confessing he was demoted from gardener to wheelbarrow operator after accidentally producing vivid orange stripes across the front lawn with a homemade fertilizer. He recounts befriending a skunk that entered his screened porch through a loose corner of screen, feeding it dried cat food for two summers until a rabies epidemic among small mammals ended the arrangement.

The book also takes on weightier subjects. Bryson critiques the severity of American drug sentencing, noting that in some states owning a single marijuana plant can bring a life sentence, while the average convicted murderer serves less than six years. He examines the paradox that Americans are twice as likely as Britons to die accidental deaths, owing to hazards ranging from moose collisions to 40,000 annual gun fatalities, yet obsess over statistically trivial risks while 40 percent refuse to wear seat belts. He catalogs government incompetence: Pentagon computer systems breached 161,000 times in a single year, Gulf War records accidentally destroyed, and a Milwaukee sheriff's department that lost live explosives at an airport for the second time. He argues that America is wasteful of resources, consuming 20 percent of the world's resources with 5 percent of its population, and warns that rising temperatures could destroy the forests of the Appalachian Mountains within two generations.

Several essays capture the texture of New England life. Bryson describes how New Hampshire's dense forests, most less than a century old, can swallow people and even aircraft: A private jet that disappeared near the local airport was never found despite the state's largest search. He celebrates the spectacular autumn foliage, explaining the science of leaf pigments while lamenting that millions of tourists rarely venture more than 150 feet from their cars. He writes lovingly of Thanksgiving, recalling his mother's one annual triumph in the kitchen, and recounts the elaborate torment of Christmas decorating, from a treacherous attic hatch to inevitably nonfunctional strings of lights.

Family life threads through the collection. Bryson writes with uncharacteristic emotion about taking his eldest son to college in Ohio, the first child to leave home, and the hollow feeling that follows. He resolves to play baseball on the front lawn with his youngest while the chance remains. Other family essays are purely comic: a disastrous beach trip to Maine involving a sandwich stolen by a dog, severe sunburn, and a wrong turn toward Canada, and a visit to one of New England's last surviving drive-in movie theaters, where a bad speaker and multiple bathroom trips result in the family watching exactly 17 minutes of film.

Bryson devotes several essays to satirical set pieces. He presents a parody of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax instructions that escalates from plausible bureaucratic jargon to absurd threats, and he offers a mock computer instruction manual whose troubleshooting section culminates in confirming that the machine is, indeed, useless. He dramatizes the ordeal of renting a car at an airport, overwhelmed by an escalating series of incomprehensible insurance options, and laments the state of American television, where dozens of channels offer nothing but the same reruns cycling endlessly.

Bryson also examines how American life discourages walking (a University of California at Berkeley study found the average American walks less than 75 miles a year), how workplace surveillance has eroded privacy, and how the immigration bureaucracy subjected his English wife to two years of fingerprints, blood tests, and contradictory paperwork before canceling her application by computer. He celebrates his adopted town of Hanover, with its low crime rate, thriving library, and civic-minded movie theater, but warns that the spread of chain retailers like Wal-Mart threatens the survival of such communities.

The final essay marks the third anniversary of the move. Bryson recalls waking in the New Hampshire house thinking he had made a terrible mistake, while his wife was immediately enchanted by the friendliness, the weather, and the absence of cow pies on the sidewalks. Over three years, much of what once seemed merely familiar has grown precious: free parking, free coffee refills, the relentlessly optimistic American temperament. He acknowledges missing England and expects to return someday, but confesses he would now miss America far more than he could have imagined. He closes by asking his readers to have a nice day, a sentiment that began as an empty American reflex but has become, for him, entirely sincere.