No Hurry to Get Home: The Memoir of the New Yorker Writer Whose Unconventional Life and Adventures Spanned the Century

Hahn tells of an exotic existence in a practical and clear voice rich with her honest observations of the people and places of Chicago, London, the Belgian Congo, and Shanghai. Not a memoir in the traditional sense, Hahn, with forthright economy, simply allows the articles she's written throughout her lifetime to illustrate tales of her travels. An inspiring read for woman and men who long for an adventurous life!

In his lively and evocative Introduction to this book, Hahn biographer Ken Cuthbertson says that Emily Hahn "moved from here to there to everywhere, like some sort of multi-colored and quixotic literary butterfly" for around forty-seven years. Sheila McGrath, in her Foreword, looks through a different lens, seeing "an inborn and unyielding independence that must have been difficult to maintain," a wholly original woman who traveled, had adventures, made friends, and wrote about all of it with an unflagging energy and dedication. She lived exactly as she chose to, for her entire long life.This book is a collection of essays that Hahn herself assembled in 1970, in order to fulfill a commitment she'd made to a publisher to produce an autobiography, which she was loathe to write, according to Cuthbertson. There are several delightful pieces on Hahn's good childhood and school days in the American midwest, and then the rest bright and incredible travel pieces - letters home, really - that appeared in The New Yorker magazine, from 1937 to 1970. (One describes a cross-country trip she and a friend made one summer during the '20's, as undergraduates, in a Model T). Artful and sensitive ordering of these pieces supplies the reader with a chronology. Unfortunately, the pieces are undated, so you must guess as to date of writing, and date of publication.Hahn's adventures and quirky and strong views are fabulous and charming - and quaint at times. From "The Big Smoke": "Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can't claim that as a reason I went to China." She supplies a witty and thorough description of how she did it. (And later, of how she kicked the habit.) In other venues she had a pet gibbon named Mr. Mills, she lived in the jungle for a while, and was literally trapped in Shanghai for a spell. Amazing things, reported in a calm - but playful - voice. The people she met and got to know are drawn less fully than her escapades. You, in turn, never really get to know them, either.Hahn does not go deep so much as range far and wide. She has a great ear, an even better eye, and is fearless. That she reported so dryly and well on her doings in the US, the Congo, China, Japan, England and Europe is the icing on the cake. A very good and atmospheric read.

'Emily Hahn was an original--a first-generation feminist who chose not to be called one, a woman of courage who constantly underplayed it, a reporter of the acts of men and animals, whose peculiar likeness she grasped perhaps better than any other writer of her time. Above all, she was a prose stylist, a plain writer whose simplicities are never simple, and whose every sentence ends with a sharp, clean bite. Her (beautifully) episodic memoirs can stand alongside those of M. F. K. Fisher, who she in so many ways resembled, as a model of clarity, precision, calm sensuality, carefully weighed sadness.' --Adam Gopnik, New Yorker writer