The myth of our family was that of my great-grandfather. He left Russia, like millions of Jews, and the story is he was headed for Chicago. Being a Jewish kid in Liverpool, you create family myths to help you survive. There’s two strands to my love of America. I’m curious, how much of your love for America came from those specific circumstances, and how much do you think it was innate? The first half of the book goes into great detail about just how crappy Britain in the ’80s was. America’s soft power was so pervasive, it just was. It’s so funny, there isn’t even a word, is there? Everybody else has one because it’s so curious, you have to be precise. What is reverse Anglophilia? Ameri-philia? I don’t know. “I’m shocked at how many of the initial wave of readers are like, ‘Dude, England, now that was the place.’ We were all working on parallel lines at different times.” “I realize, that when you don’t like your reality - and who does like their reality when they’re 15? - the impulse is to create an imaginary world away,” he says. and U.K., which for all their differences are united by an intertwined history, mutually influenced cultures, and - in the cases of Jimmy Savile and Bill Cosby - beloved childhood entertainers who turned out to be sex criminals.įirst off: Having spent his life dreaming of America, what does Bennett make of all us American Anglophiles who made the reverse psychological journey? On the eve of July 4, it seemed the perfect time to discuss the special relationship between the U.S. Back then, we mostly discussed other countries, places like Portugal, the home of Cristiano Ronaldo’s nipples, and Morocco, which Bennett called the sporting equivalent of “second cousins at a bar mitzvah.” Now, Bennett’s written a memoir, Reborn in the USA, detailing his youthful fascination with America in hilarious detail. I first interviewed Bennett back in 2018, when I used his expertise as co-host of the soccer pod Men in Blazers to explain the World Cup. citizenship as a teen, it felt like I had been granted entry into an exclusive, underground club. (They felt a similar way about me, which led two of them into the unfortunate habit of becoming Philadelphia Eagles fans.) When I got my U.K. To me, Britain was a place where the bands were all just slightly cooler, where an anxious mumbler like Hugh Grant could be a sex symbol, where cousins I’d never met lived in exotic towns like Nottingham and Macclesfield. Meanwhile, I grew up in the sunny Clinton-era suburbs, the son of an American mom and a dad from the U.K. To him, America appeared like a beacon of light from across the sea, and naturally, he moved away the first chance he got. It is a strange experience to meet your mirror-image self.Īuthor and podcast host Roger Bennett is a child of ’80s Britain - a land of economic decay, industrial unrest, and shocking violence. Visit for more exciting stories, Biographies, and News of your preferred celebrities.A scene from Love Actually that has many clever and insightful things to say about the relationship between the U.S. Roger is the brother-in-law of the comedian Nick Kroll.
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