Reviewed by Jane Ward
Posted on: June 2, 2026
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Rebecca Knuth, author of London Sojourn: Rewriting Life After Retirement, lived a childhood in Anchorage, Alaska, immersed in books. The stories that most captured her imagination were set in London, and for an introverted child of educated but strict parents, such stories allowed her experiences beyond her own. The city grew to be a beacon for her, in a sense claiming her as one of its own even before she could imagine herself traveling independently.
When a trip to London with her grandmother gives her the opportunity to see and experience everything she’d only read about, the city becomes cemented in her soul as her “go-to venue for evolving.” (xii) It is not surprising, then, that upon retirement, burnt out after a long and illustrious career in academia, Knuth chose to relocate to London, hoping to “revive that shiny girl who wanted joy and a larger life and got a little lost over the years.” (xii)
As the memoir travels back and forth in time, we see that Knuth hasn’t so much lost her way to joy and a larger life as she has never really found her own path to set out on. Instead, she has spent the first part of her life reacting to the demands of others—for example, following her parents’ advice straight into a small Christian college and wavering on the value of making a career in journalism when her father calls her efforts “trash.” (39)
A transfer into the University of Colorado for the last two years of her undergraduate degree exposes her to hippie counterculture and she begins to refuse to revert to the role of dutiful daughter when at home. The traditional mores are not easy to break free of, though, and she marries young and has a son, perhaps, she acknowledges, as “more role-playing and experience gathering.” (50) There is always a tension, however, between what she has absorbed and what she hopes for, and that longing is ultimately what leads her to single motherhood, the academic life, and eventually answering the pull to return to London.
Place as destiny is an interesting concept to ponder. In fact, the concept was my motivation for picking up this memoir. Although raised in America, I am a dual UK-US national. I have felt the pull Knuth experiences, and there are places in England where I feel the most at home and my truest self. They feel part of me and I of them.
Most of Knuth’s early experience of her retirement period in London, however, focuses on finding ways to feel at home in the place she’s always longed to call home. While the desire to exchange scholarly writing for a creative nonfiction master’s degree gives her the reason to be in the city, she finds she must work to feel any kind of belonging. She joins historical destination Meetups. These venues are so intriguing that she studies to become a city guide herself. She goes to drinks parties and lectures and museums and other cities–an exercise she calls “flaneuring.” From the French, a flaneur is person who is most often defined by the ability to “wander detached from society, for an entertainment from the observation of the urban life.”
It is this inability to overcome the feeling of detachment and the role of permanent observer that forces Knuth to confront where it is she does belong. London, while beloved, is not home. An ill mother, a brother shouldering much of the burden, and a son and his young family all converge to point her back to the US. The London interlude has been a true sojourn, then, a temporary stopover.
That is not to say hers has been a failed experiment. It is instead a personal triumph. In a most meaningful turn of events, Knuth realizes that the travel has revealed much about herself. As she writes, “I’ve sorted through womanhood and goodness, addressed how conformity clashed with my need to create and evolve. . . I’ve begun to reclaim myself from musts and shoulds. . . .” (262)
No longer the child who moved through life according to others’ plans, she has made the evolution she once could only long for. And what better way to celebrate finally owning one’s voice than to embrace being a writer and sending that unique voice out into the world?
