Living in Tracy Chapman’s House

Living in Tracy Chapman’s House

After graduating from Tufts, Jill Lepore joined a communal house, in Somerville, Massachusetts, that Chapman and her friends had set up a couple of years earlier. It was a place of endless yearning and thrilling chaos.

Living in Tracy Chapman's House

For two decades, Jill Lepore has been The New Yorker‘s history writer par excellence, examining the nooks and crannies of the past, complicating our relationships with American myth and fact. (Tellingly, the magazine tasked her with detailing a century of editorial arguments for its hundredth anniversary, a vanishingly rare assignment at a publication with an allergy to covering itself.) What a pleasure, then, to see Lepore explore a transformat…