Welcome to My Life 100 Years Ago!

I’m Mary Grace McGeehan. I traveled the world as an American diplomat for many years, with postings in Mexico, South Africa, Cambodia, Haiti, Laos, Honduras, and Namibia. After I left the Foreign Service I settled in Cape Town with my husband and, for the next two years, studied creative writing through NYU’s low-residency Writers in Paris MFA program.

As a child, I dreamed of traveling not just through space but through time. I loved books, like Edward Eager’s Half Magic series, about children who found a magical door to the past. Even after I accepted that this wasn’t going to happen, the idea lived on in my imagination. Then it occurred to me that, if I couldn’t be a time traveler, I could live like one, experiencing the world of a hundred years ago by reading news, books, and magazines from that time. So this blog–originally title My Year in 1918–was born. You can go to my first post to read more about the project.

2018 has come and gone, and I’m no longer only reading books, magazines, and news from a hundred years ago. But that era is a second home to me now, so I continue to visit often, and to blog about what I find.

Any adventure is better if it’s shared. I’d love to hear your suggestions about novels, stories, essays, recipes, and other reading and activities.

(A note about the images: due to a WordPress glitch, the photos in many posts from 2018 and 2019 were resized, throwing the posts’ composition out of whack. WordPress says that there’s no way to fix this other than manually resizing all the images, which will take a while.)