about | contact | home

Get Out and Read Women’s travel memoirs take you to unexpected places.

You’ve probably noticed that travel memoirs by women are hot right now. Thanks to the runaway success of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray, Love and the August release of the Julia Roberts movie based on it, travel as a means of finding yourself (and the love of your life) is particularly in.

Of course, Gilbert’s witty chronicle of her quest to overcome a bitter divorce and a hopeless, unhealthy love affair didn’t launch the genre of travel as a journey to self-discovery. There are plenty of earlier examples, like Rita Golden Gelman’s Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World (2001), which offer a guide to letting the open road lead you to a calmer, happier place.

In 1987 Gelman, an accomplished author of over 70 children’s books, left a glamorous but unsatisfying life in Los Angeles for Mexico, hoping to put some joy back in her life and to sort out difficulties in her marriage. The three-month hiatus from her husband turned into a six-month break and then a divorce. It wasn’t what she had planned when setting out, but she discovers a deep satisfaction in connecting with new people and cultures on her meandering, low-budget travels through Central America and beyond.

As she often notes in her memoir, she was not, as her friends and relatives believed, fleeing her troubles at home but joyfully embracing the unexpected adventures of life on the road. Through the course of the book she becomes confident in her ability to fend for herself, and her enthusiasm for experiencing new things and new places is contagious.

Still a wanderer without a permanent address, Gelman has just published Female Nomad and Friends: Tales of Breaking Free and Breaking Bread Around the World (2010), a collection of travel stories and recipes from women travelers she’s connected with taking to the road. This title has sent her on a new path, namely on a book tour, and you can hear about her love of travel firsthand at The Secret Garden Bookshop in Ballard on September 23. Check www.secretgardenbooks.com for details.

Another popular memoir is Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman (1987) by Alice Steinbach. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with the Baltimore Sun, Steinbach heads to Europe for a year to shake up her life and gain perspective on her career. The situations in which she finds herself are tame compared to Gelman’s, but her insight into the challenges of being a professional woman is sharp and the prose is delightful. She does encounter romance along the way, giving the book a dash of drama as we wonder where her relationship with a charming Japanese widower will take her.

Steinbach was inspired during her travels by the writings of intrepid adventurer Dame Freya Stark, who is back in print this year thanks to Tauris Parke Paperbacks. Stark (made a Dame of the British Empire in 1972) was one of the first Westerners to travel in parts of the Middle East and wrote A Winter in Arabia: A Journey Through Yemen and 23 other travel books and autobiographies from the 1930s through the 1980s.

Considered by many to be one of the greatest female travel writers ever, Stark’s focus in traveling to exotic places was not on soul-searching, but on shedding an accurate and informative light on the people and the cultures she encountered. In her 1993 obituary, The New York Times noted that reviewers shared the opinion that “she wrote with spirit, authority and humor and that she was a consummate traveler because of her fearlessness, candor, charm, idealism and streak of naivete.”

Stark’s classic on Yemen pairs nicely with The Woman Who Fell from the Sky: An American Journalist in Yemen (2010), Jennifer Steil’s recently published account of a year spent in the Yemeni capital Sana’a trying to introduce basic tenets of American journalism to one of the country’s two English-language newspapers. Anyone with an interest in writing and reporting will appreciate the challenges she faces. She starts with a staff of inexperienced reporters who haven’t begun to master English, don’t know the difference between fact and opinion, have no sense of how to structure a story and completely ignore deadlines.

Her apparent success in implementing deadlines and fostering a more professional approach to journalism is enjoyable to follow, but it is the relationships she builds with the women on her staff and the insight we get through her friendships into what life is like for Yemeni women that makes the book a worthwhile read.

This subgenre of life-in-a-foreign-country-for-at-least-a-year is also a rich one, with Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun (1996) the most famous example. Out this year is Marcus of Umbria: What an Italian Dog Taught an American Girl About Love (2010) by Justine van der Leun, an unexpected take on falling in love in Italy. The romance with the handsome Italian gardener doesn’t last, but van der Leun becomes attached to his family and infatuated with a young English Pointer she rescues from starvation.

At Home in Japan: A Foreign Woman’s Journey of Discovery (2010) takes this theme a step further as author Rebecca Otowa shares the ins and outs of living in a 350-year-old Japanese farmhouse, the place she’s lived since marrying into a Japanese family 30 years ago. Her descriptions and illustrations are charming, if not very revealing about her personal experiences or inner life. A far cry from the tell-all love story/travel memoirs that are common, there is something refreshing about Otowa’s self-restraint and her focus on the small details of rural life in Japan.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. We’ll be giving away these memoirs this month and more.

©Copyright 2010, Caliope Publishing Company