Meet Me in the In-Between: A Memoir

By Bella Pollen

Growing up the middle child of transatlantic parents—her English Rose mother and cowboy boot-loving father—Bella Pollen never quite figured out how to belong. Restlessly crossing back and forth between the boundaries of family and freedom, England and America, home and away, she has sought but generally failed to contain an adventurous spirit within the confines of conventional living.

When she awakes one morning in an existential panic, Pollen grudgingly concludes that in order to move forward, she needs to take a good look at her past. In Meet Me in the In-Between, Pollen takes us on the uproarious journey of a life, from her privileged, unorthodox childhood in Upper Manhattan through early marriage to a son of an alluring Mafioso, to the dusty border towns of Mexico where she embarks on a border crossing with some Pink Floyd-loving smugglers. Throughout all, Bella grapples intently with relationships, motherhood, career ups and downs, and a pathological fear of being boxed in.

Interwoven with exquisite original illustrations by the award-winning Kate Boxer, this is a tender, funny, and poignantly honest story of one woman’s quest to keep looking for the extraordinary in an ordinary life. Reminiscent of Roz Chast’s Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? and Pam Houston’s Cowboys are my Weakness, novelist Bella Pollen has created an endearingly naughty and intoxicatingly humorous, dead-on look at what it means to be a modern woman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Release date: Jun 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9780802189561

Bella Pollen

Bella Pollen is a writer and journalist who contributes to a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including the Sunday Telegraph, American Vogue, Harpers and Queen and the Observer. Her novel Hunting Unicorns was winner of the Richard & Judy Summer Read 2004. Bella lives in Ladbroke Grove, London. www.bellapollen.com