London Sojourn: Rewriting Life After Retirement
A captivating memoir of one woman’s bold leap into reinvention—trading academia for adventure, storytelling, and self-discovery in the heart of London.
At sixty-five, Rebecca Knuth walks away from the security and status of academia, determined to reinvent herself in London.
She craves more—more creativity, more stories, more life. Immersing herself in the city’s literary and cultural world, she enrolls in a creative nonfiction masters program, trains as a guide, joins the prestigious London Library, and reclaims her voice as a writer. London becomes her muse, a place of transformation where shedding her old identity is inseparable from rebuilding herself as a woman. But change is never simple.
Her mother’s health declines. She lands in intensive care. She’s harassed on the Underground. Exhaustion takes hold. Doubt creeps in—about her ambition, her motivation, even her sense of belonging. Where exactly is home?
A memoir of reinvention, resilience, and self-discovery, London Sojourn speaks to retirees, creatives, and seekers—to anyone longing to step beyond certainty into something new.
Pre-order your copy today—London Sojourn will be published January 27, 2026!
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An excerpt from Rebecca Knuth’s London Sojourn:
[A trip to London when I was twelve] transformed the city into my go-to venue for evolving…I would return again, in 1969, as a teenager in search of being young. Now, fifty years later, I wanted to change again. After almost two decades at the University of Hawaii, I was burned out. My joyous sense of privilege in being a professor had waned and I wanted to slough off chronic irritation with bureaucracy, to cast off my cocoon and respond to a stirring within, to recover something vital that had become submerged. Back in my doctoral program, I had changed supervisors after a classmate told me that I could give myself permission to say “no” based on my feelings. I was saying “no” and “yes” when I decided to take myself out of academia and return to London. It was 2014 and I was an older woman who wanted to understand how she’d arrived where she was and was wondering what was next.
I would be a self-aware “sojourner” with all its Biblical connotations of exile and learning new truths. It would be voluntary exile in which a battered academic tries to come alive and reinvent herself. I would embrace being an expatriate, pursue my love affair with all things English, write, and find a different voice. Revive that shiny girl who wanted joy and a larger life and got a little lost over the years….
London’s Heathrow Airport isn’t a classic portal, like a C.S. Lewis wardrobe, but all adventures begin with entry and this is mine. I move slowly through steel and glass corridors designed for efficiency (not romance) and zigzag in customs lines, just another passenger who hasn’t slept. I might as well be a parcel to be stamped. But the true border is internal. Who would look at this mature woman, quiet, plump, laden with a backpack, and recognize her adventurous spirit and her courage in beginning again?
For today, September 4, 2014, I am reclaiming London in a new post-retirement life. Oh, I’ve lived in London before, short-term, as a student, on a sabbatical, a fellowship, and during stints as an instructor for the University of Hawaii study abroad program. But this time, I’ll settle in for two-and-a-half years, the length of my visa. I have an agenda—to reinvent myself as a writer of creative nonfiction and break from academia’s rigid expectations. I’ll change my relationship to writing and education, enroll in two demanding programs, and, in a reversal of roles, the professor will become a pupil. The stakes—a fulfilled present and future—are high.
The traveling gods are with me and Nancy is standing beside a chauffeur in the arrivals area. I recognize her from a previous visit when I’d dropped by for tea. My new landlady is a relocated New Yorker and former professor who has been in London for forty years. The car she’s booked skirts the main roads and deposits us at her Victorian house in Islington. It’s ironic that Nancy is an expatriate, as I have entrusted her with providing me with a proper English base—her home and neighborhood. She will prove kind.
Over tea, I give myself the first of many pep talks about making the most of my time here, reminding myself that I am, in part, scoping England out as a permanent home. I want to immerse myself in the city, let go of a tourist mentality, and exchange taster experiences for a whole meal. I’ll preempt an American upbringing with a conscious pursuit of Englishness or at least come to understand how England has affected my spirit and discover whether it still has something to offer. I’ll read books featuring English settings and supplement them with jaunts, talks, walks, tours, and exhibits. I’ll ride the buses and underground, participate in community life, and gather stories. Will a new Me emerge from this late-life crisis and challenging new phase of life?
Having experienced transformation here in the past, I’m expecting the answer to be “yes,” though I have questions about exactly how. Was the idea to just experience more London or was I trying to absorb Englishness as a complete identity? And what was Englishness anyway? And why did I think I could find it in Islington? This area of North London—home to Sadler’s Wells Theatre, pubs that hosted the Sex Pistols, and art deco movie theaters—is the locus for my dive. I’ll walk thirty minutes down a canal to City University of London to attend a creative nonfiction (CNF) master of arts program. I’ll absorb Islington’s history and its culture through a nine-month guiding course featuring the area….
How I have craved an environment rooted in history. Waikiki, it’s not. It’s lovely in a different way. I stop to chat with an elderly neighbor. She moves slowly on her walker, but we amble down a block together and she points out the dark red door of her house. They bought it in the 1980s when, she says, no one valued these houses or realized how perfectly located they were nor how beautiful. Now, of course, the scaffolding is up, the gentrification constant, and each house is worth a million or more pounds….
Northchurch Road is a designated bike path. Metal posts block through traffic, and a constant flow of casually dressed riders cruise down the tree-lined street. They seem curiously restful and organic, in contrast with Honolulu cyclists, who I associate with drug deals, or Colorado’s spandex road knights (skinny, with big noses and genital bunches like soft cauliflowers). Few fit George Orwell’s vision of England: “. . . the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings,” and my romantic view of the mellowness of English bicyclists has had to survive one cyclist’s curses—but that was down by the main road and the car probably did cut him off….
How lovely it is to sit near my window fronting the street and dash off an email. I mention that as I’m typing, there’s a clip-clop of hoofs outside with the police patrolling on horseback. Out of the window, leaves wiggle gently to the ground, one by one, inviting me to walk along the canal, accessible a few streets over and down a dilapidated stairway. ..
Now, finally in London, I can live my future, find the stillness where I can work productively, write, and lead a more reflective yet colorful life….
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