It has been disconcerting and salutary to keep discovering that whatever I may have thought—or at any given moment think—that I might say about Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands has already been said and written (transcribed?) and published (even before the book itself), if not by Hall himself, then by one of his many and prolific interlocutors in the course of multiple expansive, engrossing, and ongoing conversations that I have been overhearing in fragments since I started graduate school in 1986. Reading and working through a book that had originated as a dialogue between Hall and Bill Schwarz and was, on the latter’s account in his preface, made possible—as Hall’s physical capacities to read and write deteriorated—through collective efforts echoes the dissonances implicit in the text’s title, further amplifying the sense of “déjà vu all over again”1 that Familiar Stranger precipitated for me.
I never met or...
