"Every place writes its own elegy before it is founded. Each beginning is an end to what has preceded it; something has always come before. So excavate your own cellar, then the ruins on top of which it was laid, and the bones beneath the ruins. Then dig some more." Melissa Holbrook Pierson, who wrote these words in The Place You Love Is Gone, is an inveterate digger, unearthing the past with the fervor of a truffle hound.

Subtitled "Progress Hits Home," Pierson's just-published book is an idiosyncratic blend of essay, memoir, and poetic travelogue, in which she revisits her childhood home (Akron, Ohio), the about-to-boom town where she spent her 20s (Hoboken), and the Ashokan Reservoir, just up the road from her current address in Ulster County, whose waters replaced 2,000 homes in the hamlets of Shokan, Brodhead's Bridge, Brown's Station, Olive Bridge, West Hurley, Glenford, Olive, and Ashton.

We're meeting at Jack & Luna's, a recently renovated café on what comprises Stone Ridge's shopping strip, opposite the mini-mall with the Subway franchise and the vast parking lot of the Towne Centre. Over the phone, Pierson insisted this is the "perfect" place for our interview; she'll tell me why when we arrive. Jack & Luna's proprietor Julie Bowman confirms the rumor that the building was relocated from the Ashokan Reservoir, where it served as an engineer's shack before being "repurposed" and moved overland to its present location.

Pierson orders a chai latte, drapes her black mandarin-collared coat over a chair, and gets right down to business. She's just finished the first four hookups of a satellite-radio book tour arranged by her publisher, W.W. Norton, which will include some 25 on-air interviews phoned in from her home. It seems ironically apt that a book about the loss of specific and actual places should be promoted in absentia.

The Place You Love Is Gone earned glowing reviews in the New York Times and the Times Picayune of New Orleans, a city that knows all too well how it feels to lose familiar landmarks. But if New Orleans was drowned by inadequate levees and bureaucratic negligence, the Esopus Creek valley was flooded to slake an insatiable thirst. As New York City's population swelled at the turn of the 20th century, its water supply dwindled. So what if those fertile creek valleys 100 miles north were home to a few thousand farmers? The city must drink.

The scope of the Catskill land grab was dizzying. People were turned out of ancestral homes with a mere two weeks' notice; even the dead were removed from their graves. "[The book] started in my head when I imagined someone knocking on the door of my house, my own little house, and saying, 'Sorry, you have to leave, we're taking it.' What would that feel like to every one of us?" In print, Pierson's outrage is even more strongly rendered: "Imagine the Togo Islanders arriving on your doorstep to announce they need the topsoil under your house, so it has been condemned. And you just redid the kitchen!"

Pierson's prose moves at an antic gallop, veering between high and low culture; she can reference Proust and Mr. Peanut in almost the same breath. She has a disarming habit of preempting any possible criticism, cheerfully accusing herself here of narcissism, there of whining, even of leading an army of righteous nostalgists armed with green and red plastic cocktail swords. She's an audacious writer, drawn to exclamation points, second-person constructions, and odd free-associative leaps—what's the mortality rate of test dogs for vaginal-yeast cream doing in a paragraph about Yi-Fu Tuan's Topophilia?

The book's first two sections, on Akron and Hoboken, are framed in autobiographical close-up—the remembrance of places past—but the Ashokan Reservoir section chooses the long lens of history. Pierson explains, "The story of these people was just too big. Not only were the places they'd lived in and known taken away from them, but a whole level of human and cultural life was expunged. They were living an agrarian life, the remnants of a life that was lived in these places 400 years ago. What was lost was much more than the personal. It was a whole way of life."

She's quick to point out that such rapacious development isn't a thing of the past. The Catskill reservoirs are a drop in the bucket to China's vast Three Gorges Dam, which has displaced over a million people. Nor did local construction cease when every steam whistle within a 12-mile radius blew for an hour to signal the Ashokan dam's completion. Pierson is horrified by current proposals to build a 600-unit gated community off the Hurley rail trail and develop Kingston's Rondout district with over 2,000 waterfront condos. "Kingston would be ruined in one swoop. It breaks my heart."

She extols the treasures of Kingston's architecture, from intact Dutch colonial houses to neon "Chop Suey" signs, and the glories of Kingston Point Park, where she walks her dog. The half-hidden acreage, with its magnificent views of the Hudson, "was Kingston's amusement park in bygone days. There was a carousel, a trolley line—you'd see people in Victorian costumes parading along the paths. I love the feeling of living history there. You can still see the pilings for the gazebos." 

The reservoir section of The Place You Love Is Gone opens with a recitation of local mythology: that in times of drought, "the tips of the church steeples emerge and soon the lost towns rise up from their graves." The speaker was Pierson's husband, writer Luc Sante, well-known for his eloquent musings on bygone times and impermanence. (Sante was profiled in these pages last April.) This image ignited her imagination, and when Sante conceded that he'd never get around to writing "that reservoir thing," Pierson practiced her own bit of eminent domain, seizing the concept and mixing it in with some other ideas she had about definitions of home and the frantic acceleration of change.

"When I write, I don't know where I'm going to end up," she insists. "My titles are always cliffhangers—I don't know what to call a book till I've written it. Luc can't write a book until he has the title."

Sante and Pierson met at Time, Inc., where they both worked as proofreaders while trying to jumpstart their freelance careers. She was living in Hoboken, he in Brooklyn. They moved in together, eventually finding a weekend place in Delaware County. When their son Raphael was born, the commute between households became overwhelming. They bought their Lomontville Victorian house in 2000, "just under the wire, before real estate went totally bonkers."

The two-writer couple rarely read each other's manuscripts, but they talk constantly about their obsessions and projects. "Luc is my in-house library," Pierson glows; in her book's acknowledgments, she calls him her "artistic hero." Indeed, she credits Sante with giving her the courage to write books at all. When he arrived at their first date with galley proofs of his first book, she was awestruck.

Pierson's first books are meditations on two of her early obsessions: motorcycles (The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles; 1997) and horses (Black Beauties and Dark Horses: Animals, Women, a Passion; 2000). Does she see a connection between these topics and her new book? "It's passion. The things people fall in love with, the whole mechanics of love, what drives us in terms of the things we want and can't do without. Home is one of those things."

In the final section of The Place You Love Is Gone, Pierson mourns the loss of the practical, everyday knowledge that once was the province of every settler, preserved in such "log-cabin writings" as the Little House in the Big Woods series: how to put up food, make a toy from a pig's bladder, build a house with your own hands.

"We've become more and more disconnected, not just from the land but from who we were, what we've evolved as," she says, setting her chai aside. "The question is, who are we now?"

She's on a roll, talking heatedly about the displacement of Native American tribes from their ancestral lands—"they were treated like squirrels: move 'em away, shoot 'em, doesn't matter"—and then moving on to the squirrels themselves. "We always think everything belongs to us. What is this arbitrary law that says land belongs to humans? Am I the only person who cares about this? I must be some kind of weird crank."

Pierson's voice rises in pitch. She seems unaware that the Kenco-dressed workmen at the next table have turned to listen. "This is the character of our place, the farms and the woods. Take those away and it's no longer that place. The very 'placeness' of a place is taken. In America, we have this religion of private property, that you can take your land and do whatever you want with it. But it affects me, and all the other creatures who live in it. So why is it allowed?" The tremble of hope in her voice suggests an auctioneer, her pauses entreating the listener to stop the gavel from falling. The place you love is going...going...

Your move.