BOOK REVIEW: If You Lived Here You’d be Home By Now by Christopher Ingraham @_cingraham @HarperCollins #bookreview #ifyoulivedhereyoudbehomebynow

Honest, humorous, thought-provoking, and intellectually stimulating—Christopher Ingraham’s memoir If You Lived Here You’d Be Home by Now chronicles the article he wrote that ended up changing his life, and what has happened since. I loved this book and I highly recommend it, especially if you’ve lived in a larger city! It stimulated a lot of thought in me about what I want out of life, and if I’m happy where I’m at. Wonderful!

About the Book

In 2015 Christopher Ingraham wrote an article that changed his life. Working as a data reporter for the Washington Post, Ingraham wrote an article about a ranking of all counties in the U.S. on their aesthetic beauty based on a natural amenities index. Things like the gap between the coldest and hottest average temperatures and access to natural water sources seem like great metrics, but it’s hard to quantify what makes a place great to live.

Ingraham not only reported on some of the most beautiful counties according to this list, but also gave a shout out to the place in dead last, Red Lake County, Minnesota calling it “the worst place to live in America” and citing a fun fact about their county being that it is the only landlocked county in the U.S. surrounded by just two adjacent counties. Fun!

The story went viral and tweets poured in. Among the reactions were many from residents of Red Lake County.  While they were unflappably polite – it’s not called “Minnesota Nice” for nothing – they challenged him to look beyond the spreadsheet and actually visit their community. Ingraham, with slight trepidation, accepted. 

And from there, history was made. Upon returning to the Baltimore suburb where he and his wife Briana struggled to make ends meet, find enough room for their twin sons, and manage the 3+ hour commute to Washington D. C. for work, Ingraham found himself thinking that life in rural America wasn’t so bad. Impressed by the locals’ warmth, humor and hospitality—and ever more aware of his financial situation and torturous commute–Chris and Briana eventually decided to relocate to the town he’d just dragged through the dirt on the Internet.

Reflection

More than 80% of the U.S. population lives in cities or the surrounding suburbs. And yet, Ingraham remarks and provides data throughout the novel that city life isn’t actually so great, depending on the metric you use. When we look in the 60s and 70s when salaries were growing and resources and jobs were located in cities, the transition of the population to city environments made sense. Now, salaries are pretty stagnant, which means the burden and cost of city life is almost entirely on the people, not the companies who hire them.

Teleworking is an answer to that challenge, according to Ingraham. In the first third of the book, he explores a lot of the challenges of life that he and his wife took as a given—the long commutes, the trouble finding affordable housing, the proximity to neighbors they don’t particularly like or know—as part of life. There’s no better way. After he returned from Red Lake County, all of that changed. He really noticed what in his life was making him miserable. And he also realized there is a solution. His job technically didn’t require him to be in DC, so with approval, they moved.

I found Ingraham’s writing to be filled with humor, interesting facts, and wonderful commentary on the absurd place he found himself, and what he liked about it. Everything isn’t roses—there are a few crises he mentions that genuinely made him worried he made the wrong move—but everything worked out ok. The resource of a community willing to do everything to help far outweighs the access to better resources in other ways in a city.

In fact, the worst part of living in Red Lake County, Minnesota, seems to be the coffee (Minnesotans evidently are proud that they drink it black but that is only because it is mostly water) and the pizza. In fact, the best pizza in the state of Minnesota, Ingraham alleges, is DiGiorno, followed distantly by Dominos. I’d love someone from Minnesota to weigh in on this, because that was a fact I found alarming! Pizza is one of the best foods, and the proud Chicagoan in me is horrified!

This book is about how data can never really tell the full story, and how making a leap of faith in your life can turn your preconceptions on their heads and bring you something you never thought possible. I loved this book!

About the Author

Christopher Ingraham writes about all things data, with a particular interest in gun policy and drug policy. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center. He is currently living in Red Lake Falls, Minnesota with his wife and three kids and writing for the Washington Post.

Thank you to Harper Collins for my copy. Opinions are my own.