Review: Places I Stopped on the Way Home: A Memoir of Chaos and Grace by Meg Fee

3 stars for Places I Stopped on the Way Home: A Memoir of Chaos and Grace by Meg Fee.

I am not sure what to make of this memoir. It is a book I enjoy reading but do not enjoy in it. Call me anything but shallow, I feel that the author should have loved herself more, treat herself with more kindness and respect. She deserves better. But then, these are all in the past. And so, it is good to know that she knows to keep going.

This book is a collection of essays that covers ten years of the author's living in New York, from when she was accepted to Juilliard at the age of eighteen. It is a brutally honest storytelling, sad and bittersweet yet flowing with youthful enthusiasm and hope. It records the author's attempt to find happiness and meaning in life. Her constant search for answers reveals a life laced with more pessimism than not, more sadness than happiness, more grief than joy, more fear than security, more chaos than balance, more questions than answers. Basically, the perspectives project a depressing life filled with heartaches and dripping with loneliness.

I have never felt more alive reading a memoir about friendship and love, heartbreak and loneliness, fear and insecurity, and failure and suffering, all in the promise of a yet to be. Sad as it is, however, there are times I cannot understand why the author chooses to subject herself to such misery. It is good that the author faces up to it eventually and learns to self-love.

This book is a reminder to self-love, to live in the present, to live life to the fullest no matter where we are and to treasure what we have. Home is not a place. Home is where the heart is.


Publisher: Icon Books; Reprint edition
Publication date: 9 Jul 2019

*** Favourite Quote 1 ***

Already I know we are on borrowed time - that it's only lasted as long as it has because we met at a time when loneliness flitted at the edge of every image, threatening and ever-present.

*** Favourite quote 2 ***

.. loneliness, stripped of the many layers in which we dress it, is fundamentally the same.

*** Favourite quote 3 ***

Our job is not to create a masterpiece, but to give voice to that which only we can give voice to. Our job is to go to work doing that which we feel called to do.

*** Favourite quote 4 ***

Keep going, not because it's easy, but because that is what it is to be human.

~ Places I Stopped on the Way Home
Meg Fee

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In Places I Stopped on the Way Home, Meg Fee plots a decade of her life in New York City – from falling in love at the Lincoln Center to escaping the roommate (and bedbugs) from hell on Thompson Street, chasing false promises on 66th Street and the wrong men everywhere, and finding true friendships over glasses of wine in Harlem and Greenwich Village.

Weaving together her joys and sorrows, expectations and uncertainties, aspirations and realities, the result is an exhilarating collection of essays about love and friendship, failure and suffering, and above all hope. Join Meg on her heart-wrenching journey, as she cuts the difficult path to finding herself and finding home.

*Blurb from Goodreads*

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