I spent a week in New York last September, in an attempt to escape from what had been an unexpectedly dour summer, and it was heaven. I’d been to the US before, though not for a long time, and somehow something clicked in 2023. I returned to London and found it small and grey and boring, and swore to myself that I would find a way to cross the Atlantic again soon enough.
In the end, I got my wish. I spent five weeks in New York last spring, and another four travelling around during the election campaign. Back in April, a few days before catching my return flight, I remember sitting on the stoop of the Brooklyn brownstone I was staying in and thinking: I’ve seen enough. I’m ready to go home.
This time, I worried that this moment would never come. I was just having too great a time gallivanting around the US, merrily eating and drinking and visiting foreign lands, and meeting all sorts of odd and fascinating people. Could I ever really long for dull, damp Britain again, now I’d experienced life in the greatest country in the world?
As it turns out, I could. Of course, the result of the election had something to do with it. It’s hard to get too attached to a country that has just voted for a man who hates you and everyone like you. Still, it just isn’t the whole story: if I’m being honest, the realisation that I fundamentally do not belong in America came before November 5.
It came when I looked at the size of their cars – some of them seemingly as big as mountains – and the weakness of their coffee. It hit me when I looked at the people around me on the subway, and when I eavesdropped on their conversations in bars and restaurants. It became clear then even clearer whenever I interacted with them.
Americans aren’t my people, not for one great reason but for a thousand small ones. They speak too loudly and I simply do not trust that veneer of cheerful politeness they carry everywhere. I find their puritanism distasteful, perhaps ironically, and struggle to read and understand them. I don’t like their disdain for walking and their love of gigantic food portions. Their culture baffles me, and the scale of their country is too intimidating.
In a way, I think my subconscious realised all this long before I did. In New York, I am a smoker and I drink espressos; I mostly wear black and I punctuate every other sentence with “blimey” or “crikey”. In short: when I live in the US, I transform into a parody of a European woman. These are not things I do when living in London, and so must conclude that they were developed as a way to tell the people around me that I am not one of them.
Crucially, it isn’t something I did when I left France; if anything, all I wanted at the time was to blend in. This is probably why I still call it home now, 15 years later. Brits are different from the French in a million and one ways but, ultimately, we remain part of one family. The same just cannot be said of Americans.
It is possible that this makes me parochial but, ultimately, I believe that the US will forever remain a distant, alien land to me. I don’t understand Americans and they don’t understand me, and that is fine but I simply do not have the energy to try to bridge that gap.
That I got to spend two months there was a delight and a privilege, but I would struggle to ever see it as anything but an extended holiday in a different world. My heart belongs in Europe, that ancient, complicated and often infuriating continent, and just across the water in Morocco, where my mother’s family lives.
I was born in a little corner of the world and, as it turns out, I love that corner very much. That isn’t luck I will ever take for granted again.
Americans may have their high salaries, hegemonic popular culture, white teeth and 24-hour diners; I’d take our European cynicism and crumbling old buildings over all of that any day of the week. Now Alexa, please play Ode to Joy, thank you.
