Latest news with #CherylStrayed
The Guardian
03-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The end of the road? What The Salt Path scandal means for the nature memoir
When The Salt Path came out in 2018, it was a publishing phenomenon, going on to sell more than 2m copies globally. As even those who haven't read it are likely to know by now, the book charted Raynor Winn and her husband Moth's emotionally and physically transformative long-distance walk along the South West Coast Path in the wake of utter disaster: a financial collapse that cost them their home, and Moth's diagnosis with an incurable neurological disorder. Winn followed it with two further books in a similar vein, The Wild Silence and Landlines, also bestsellers. Earlier this year came a film of The Salt Path, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. That original book by a first-time writer had become what writers, editors and booksellers all dream of: a bestselling, spin-off generating brand. But it wasn't the first nature memoir to top the charts, by any means. In 2012, Wild by Cheryl Strayed described the 26-year‑old's hike across the west coast of America in the wake of her mother's death and the end of her marriage, and after soaring up the book charts it was made into a film starring Reese Witherspoon two years later. That same year, H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald was a surprise bestseller, telling the story of a year spent training a Eurasian goshawk as a journey through grief after the death of their father. In 2016, Amy Liptrot's The Outrun saw her return to the sheep farm on Orkney where she'd grown up in order to recover from addiction through contact with nature; it was also recently filmed, with Saoirse Ronan in the lead role. Meanwhile, in last year's bestselling Raising Hare, foreign policy adviser Chloe Dalton describes moving to the countryside, rescuing a leveret and rediscovering her relationship with the land. There is clearly a thriving market for this particular blend of nature writing, personal memoir and a specific form of self-help in which the embattled individual – or in the case of The Salt Path, a couple – finds solace, sustenance and even redemption by withdrawing from everyday society and launching themselves into the great outdoors. It's not difficult to see why such narratives are attractive, but what do they tell us about ourselves and our relationship with the natural world? And what damage might The Salt Path affair do to this genre of nature memoir? It is not given to any of us to know the definitive truth, of course, and any memoir is subject to the pitfalls of perception, memory and judgment. But the two most significant accusations levelled against Winn are that, some time before the journey described in The Salt Path, she embezzled large amounts of money from an employer, and that she exaggerated the severity of Moth's illness. She denies both, and is particularly insistent that neither she nor Moth intended to suggest that their travels were a miracle cure for his condition. However, the book tapped into a strong desire among readers for narratives of healing through nature. For Melissa Harrison, author of novels for adults and children as well as nonfiction ranging from memoir to nature guides, these kinds of nature books represent 'proxies through which we can relate to the natural world in a way that most of us don't have the time or the inclination to in real life'. Reading about someone else's deep dive into forest, field or water furnishes us with the sense that we're participating in an environment that, for much of the time, is at arm's length. 'That mediated experience is reassuring: it tells us that we still have the capacity for a certain depth and intensity of feeling, and that one day, when whatever the circumstances are that prevent us from doing so currently are over, we can pick up our relationship with nature where we left off – most likely in adolescence – and find meaning and belonging again.' Harrison adds a cautionary note, however, about the 'healing narrative' or 'quest structure' in such nature writing. Having admired Dalton's work, for example, she observes that 'for every Raising Hare there are five books in which it seems the author simply wanted to write a nature memoir and cast about for some kind of experience to structure the book. Readers deserve better – and publishers should do better than this.' Harrison is not the only writer I speak with to bring up the issue of publishers' responsibilities. Indeed, the post-Salt Path conversation has included criticism of Winn's publisher, Penguin Random House, and its perceived failure to carry out due diligence on her manuscript. While the more trenchant comments seem tinged with a post-hoc lack of realism – can editors really be expected to play detective and, for example, interview a prospective writer's wider circle to establish veracity? – there is more justification for the feeling that the industry will publish relentlessly into an area it deems likely to achieve mainstream success, even if that means green-lighting repetitive or imitative work. Mo Hafeez, a commissioning editor at Faber, agrees that there has been a certain homogenisation of writing about the natural world, especially in work coming through after the pandemic. 'People were engaging in nature more, purely by virtue of being in lockdown and not being able to see each other,' he says. 'There was this surge of nature writing that came through, and often, instead of it being career-long naturalists or academics or people who had been writing in this area for a long time, it was everyday people's engagements with nature. Which in a way was very lovely, and it democratised the genre quite a lot, but it got to a point where it was quite a saturated area of the market.' The challenge, he thinks, is to resist expectations of what a nature memoir should look like, and remain open to work from unexpected angles – he has recently been reading the poet Jason Allen-Paisant's nonfiction exploration of rural landscapes in the UK and in Jamaica, for example. There are numerous writers who sit within the genre but are writing according to their own imperative, rather than a notional market: an incomplete list might include Noreen Masud, whose book A Flat Place observes trauma through the lens of different landscapes; poet Polly Atkin, author of a biography of Dorothy Wordsworth and a memoir, Some of Us Just Fall, in which she contemplates her own chronic illness; and Natasha Carthew, writer and founder of the Nature Writing prize for working class writers. It's likely that none of these writers will compete with Raynor Winn in terms of sales. Bestselling books become so because idea, execution, publishing knowhow and the zeitgeist combine in precisely the right way and at the right moment to capture readers' imagination. One can certainly see what made The Salt Path successful: a compelling piece of storytelling in its own right, it tapped into deeply held anxieties about the sudden loss of home and health, and countered them with a portrait of resilience against the odds. It is the accusation that Winn misrepresented her husband's illness, and that the books allowed, if not encouraged, readers to believe that the couple's walks and wild camping had led to an improvement in his condition, that has provoked the most vehement negative reactions. That strength of feeling is telling. 'What I'm interested in,' says Rachel Hewitt, author of In Her Nature, 'is that use of physical illness as morally unambiguous. It's a shield, isn't it?' She argues that the full story – whatever the truth of it – would have made a more interesting narrative. But it is easier to market the more crafted tale, which is 'actually very simple: a walk from illness to recovery, a walk from homelessness to finding a new concept of home. You know, all those things are quite simple, and there's clearly something within publishing houses or within readers that really responds to that.' Writing about illness is an intensely personal and immensely delicate undertaking, both in terms of the challenges it holds for the writer and the impact it can have on the reader. Susan Sontag famously outlined the dangers in Illness As Metaphor; Hilary Mantel counselled that 'illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false.' Hewitt suggests that there might be an inherent smoothing over of complication in the stories that publishers find it easiest to present to the public; and that a woman in her 50s, with a necessarily involved past, constitutes a challenge to that narrative simplicity. Hewitt is currently contemplating writing about grief from the perspective of her own widowhood, and has become increasingly aware of 'these sort of neat, linear narratives that have become such a staple of nature writing, but don't represent human experience'. In terms of writing about the natural world, author Nic Wilson believes this approach is symptomatic of 'much wider societal attitudes towards nature and the transactional way that quite a lot of our society goes into the relationship with nature'. Her debut book, Land Beneath the Waves, has been published recently, and she explains how she initially resisted the idea of writing about her family history and her own chronic illness in relation to nature, deterred partly by an awareness of the limitations of memory, and partly by a belief that her story was too 'ordinary'. 'I think perhaps even some of the books that are billed as healing narratives are more complex than that. It's just that this becomes sort of a trope that's talked about. And I think it simplifies things, and sets a precedent that other books are expected to follow, which is not helpful to [having] a diversity of voices within memoir, particularly within nature memoir, because the greater diversity of voices we have, the more people's individual experiences are validated and spoken to.' Through all these conversations, there's a clear insistence that we need to see 'nature' not as a resource, but as a multifaceted and interdependent series of contexts and environments. 'Let's be honest, it's full of death, isn't it?' says James Rebanks, whose accounts of his life as a farmer in The Shepherd's Life and English Pastoral have recently been joined by The Place of Tides, a memoir about time spent with a wild duck farmer on a Norwegian island. As he points out, nature is 'full of death and disease and failure and decline. It isn't all butterflies, sunshine and healing, is it? In my last book, I was trying to make it more complicated: nature can be lonely. Nature can be too quiet. It can be too isolated. It can lead to you not being in the right place. And nature itself is broken, so it can make you depressed. It's falling apart around you. I find it more interesting when it's less about personal redemption and more of a mirror on the big things that I care about: the politics, the economics, what's actually really happening in the world.' Rebanks, who loves Tolstoy and the American writer Wendell Berry and thinks of himself in the tradition of the agrarian radical, is an engaging presence, both off and on the page and, like the best writers on nature, is alive to the frequent contradictions in portraying it in either fiction or nonfiction. Helen Macdonald, too, whose prize-winning H Is for Hawk has been made into a film with Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson, is acutely aware of the expectations we bring to the genre. 'Nature is considered to be the one place free of human artifice, the place where deep universal truths can be uncovered that are not to do with us,' Macdonald says, 'which, of course, is bullshit. That's not the case. We put all our deepest human meanings into nature. We sort of force them in there, and then we use them to prove the veracity of our own concepts back at us, which is what nature writing does all the time.' Macdonald highlights a literary-critical tradition that is useful in understanding both the success of The Salt Path and the reaction to its alleged departures from fact. 'Tramp' or 'vagabonding' literature, which flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries, was by its nature highly individualistic and accepted to contain fabrications; it encompassed writing by those who were marginalised from society, and those, like George Orwell, who put themselves in that position in order to analyse societal structures. It's a world away from contemporary memoir and the idea that nature can be instrumental in making us feel better. So is the genre now facing an existential crisis? Is there still room in the market for stories of journeys into the wilderness, complete with a healing narrative? For Jessica Lee, author of books for both adults and children and the founder of The Willowherb Review, which ran from 2018 to 2022 and aimed to provide a platform for writers of colour, the issues raised by The Salt Path furore present us with an opportunity to explore innovative ways of writing about nature. 'If we're talking about wanting to write about the natural world,' Lee says, 'we can't get rid of ourselves. We can't write ourselves out of the narratives; we're the ones telling the story. But what we can do is allow the world to inform the shape that we take.' That means resisting the idea of linear progression, or redemptive arcs, in favour of the cyclical and the messy. 'The personal, with us at the centre, can be the door that opens the story. But then we really need to be very proactively seeking to undo that the second we've opened that door.' Meanwhile, the fallout from such microscopic attention to a huge bestseller offers us a window into the realities of nature publishing, where experimentation and complexity persist, but often do so without the resources afforded to more commercially appealing narratives. A salutary lesson, perhaps, but not one likely to deter the most adventurous and committed of those attempting to survey our threatened environment and to capture both its wonders and its fragility.
The Guardian
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The end of the road? What The Salt Path scandal means for the nature memoir
When The Salt Path came out in 2018, it was a publishing phenomenon, going on to sell more than 2m copies globally. As even those who haven't read it are likely to know by now, the book charted Raynor Winn and her husband Moth's emotionally and physically transformative long-distance walk along the South West Coast Path in the wake of utter disaster: a financial collapse that cost them their home, and Moth's diagnosis with an incurable neurological disorder. Winn followed it with two further books in a similar vein, The Wild Silence and Landlines, also bestsellers. Earlier this year came a film of The Salt Path, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. That original book by a first-time writer had become what writers, editors and booksellers all dream of: a bestselling, spin-off generating brand. But it wasn't the first nature memoir to top the charts, by any means. In 2012, Wild by Cheryl Strayed described the 26-year‑old's hike across the west coast of America in the wake of her mother's death and the end of her marriage, and after soaring up the book charts it was made into a film starring Reese Witherspoon two years later. That same year, H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald was a surprise bestseller, telling the story of a year spent training a Eurasian goshawk as a journey through grief after the death of their father. In 2016, Amy Liptrot's The Outrun saw her return to the sheep farm on Orkney where she'd grown up in order to recover from addiction through contact with nature; it was also recently filmed, with Saoirse Ronan in the lead role. Meanwhile, in last year's bestselling Raising Hare, foreign policy adviser Chloe Dalton describes moving to the countryside, rescuing a leveret and rediscovering her relationship with the land. There is clearly a thriving market for this particular blend of nature writing, personal memoir and a specific form of self-help in which the embattled individual – or in the case of The Salt Path, a couple – finds solace, sustenance and even redemption by withdrawing from everyday society and launching themselves into the great outdoors. It's not difficult to see why such narratives are attractive, but what do they tell us about ourselves and our relationship with the natural world? And what damage might The Salt Path affair do to this genre of nature memoir? It is not given to any of us to know the definitive truth, of course, and any memoir is subject to the pitfalls of perception, memory and judgment. But the two most significant accusations levelled against Winn are that, some time before the journey described in The Salt Path, she embezzled large amounts of money from an employer, and that she exaggerated the severity of Moth's illness. She denies both, and is particularly insistent that neither she nor Moth intended to suggest that their travels were a miracle cure for his condition. However, the book tapped into a strong desire among readers for narratives of healing through nature. For Melissa Harrison, author of novels for adults and children as well as nonfiction ranging from memoir to nature guides, these kinds of nature books represent 'proxies through which we can relate to the natural world in a way that most of us don't have the time or the inclination to in real life'. Reading about someone else's deep dive into forest, field or water furnishes us with the sense that we're participating in an environment that, for much of the time, is at arm's length. 'That mediated experience is reassuring: it tells us that we still have the capacity for a certain depth and intensity of feeling, and that one day, when whatever the circumstances are that prevent us from doing so currently are over, we can pick up our relationship with nature where we left off – most likely in adolescence – and find meaning and belonging again.' Harrison adds a cautionary note, however, about the 'healing narrative' or 'quest structure' in such nature writing. Having admired Dalton's work, for example, she observes that 'for every Raising Hare there are five books in which it seems the author simply wanted to write a nature memoir and cast about for some kind of experience to structure the book. Readers deserve better – and publishers should do better than this.' Harrison is not the only writer I speak with to bring up the issue of publishers' responsibilities. Indeed, the post-Salt Path conversation has included criticism of Winn's publisher, Penguin Random House, and its perceived failure to carry out due diligence on her manuscript. While the more trenchant comments seem tinged with a post-hoc lack of realism – can editors really be expected to play detective and, for example, interview a prospective writer's wider circle to establish veracity? – there is more justification for the feeling that the industry will publish relentlessly into an area it deems likely to achieve mainstream success, even if that means green-lighting repetitive or imitative work. Mo Hafeez, a commissioning editor at Faber, agrees that there has been a certain homogenisation of writing about the natural world, especially in work coming through after the pandemic. 'People were engaging in nature more, purely by virtue of being in lockdown and not being able to see each other,' he says. 'There was this surge of nature writing that came through, and often, instead of it being career-long naturalists or academics or people who had been writing in this area for a long time, it was everyday people's engagements with nature. Which in a way was very lovely, and it democratised the genre quite a lot, but it got to a point where it was quite a saturated area of the market.' The challenge, he thinks, is to resist expectations of what a nature memoir should look like, and remain open to work from unexpected angles – he has recently been reading the poet Jason Allen-Paisant's nonfiction exploration of rural landscapes in the UK and in Jamaica, for example. There are numerous writers who sit within the genre but are writing according to their own imperative, rather than a notional market: an incomplete list might include Noreen Masud, whose book A Flat Place observes trauma through the lens of different landscapes; poet Polly Atkin, author of a biography of Dorothy Wordsworth and a memoir, Some of Us Just Fall, in which she contemplates her own chronic illness; and Natasha Carthew, writer and founder of the Nature Writing prize for working class writers. It's likely that none of these writers will compete with Raynor Winn in terms of sales. Bestselling books become so because idea, execution, publishing knowhow and the zeitgeist combine in precisely the right way and at the right moment to capture readers' imagination. One can certainly see what made The Salt Path successful: a compelling piece of storytelling in its own right, it tapped into deeply held anxieties about the sudden loss of home and health, and countered them with a portrait of resilience against the odds. It is the accusation that Winn misrepresented her husband's illness, and that the books allowed, if not encouraged, readers to believe that the couple's walks and wild camping had led to an improvement in his condition, that has provoked the most vehement negative reactions. That strength of feeling is telling. 'What I'm interested in,' says Rachel Hewitt, author of In Her Nature, 'is that use of physical illness as morally unambiguous. It's a shield, isn't it?' She argues that the full story – whatever the truth of it – would have made a more interesting narrative. But it is easier to market the more crafted tale, which is 'actually very simple: a walk from illness to recovery, a walk from homelessness to finding a new concept of home. You know, all those things are quite simple, and there's clearly something within publishing houses or within readers that really responds to that.' Writing about illness is an intensely personal and immensely delicate undertaking, both in terms of the challenges it holds for the writer and the impact it can have on the reader. Susan Sontag famously outlined the dangers in Illness As Metaphor; Hilary Mantel counselled that 'illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false.' Hewitt suggests that there might be an inherent smoothing over of complication in the stories that publishers find it easiest to present to the public; and that a woman in her 50s, with a necessarily involved past, constitutes a challenge to that narrative simplicity. Hewitt is currently contemplating writing about grief from the perspective of her own widowhood, and has become increasingly aware of 'these sort of neat, linear narratives that have become such a staple of nature writing, but don't represent human experience'. In terms of writing about the natural world, author Nic Wilson believes this approach is symptomatic of 'much wider societal attitudes towards nature and the transactional way that quite a lot of our society goes into the relationship with nature'. Her debut book, Land Beneath the Waves, has been published recently, and she explains how she initially resisted the idea of writing about her family history and her own chronic illness in relation to nature, deterred partly by an awareness of the limitations of memory, and partly by a belief that her story was too 'ordinary'. 'I think perhaps even some of the books that are billed as healing narratives are more complex than that. It's just that this becomes sort of a trope that's talked about. And I think it simplifies things, and sets a precedent that other books are expected to follow, which is not helpful to [having] a diversity of voices within memoir, particularly within nature memoir, because the greater diversity of voices we have, the more people's individual experiences are validated and spoken to.' Through all these conversations, there's a clear insistence that we need to see 'nature' not as a resource, but as a multifaceted and interdependent series of contexts and environments. 'Let's be honest, it's full of death, isn't it?' says James Rebanks, whose accounts of his life as a farmer in The Shepherd's Life and English Pastoral have recently been joined by The Place of Tides, a memoir about time spent with a wild duck farmer on a Norwegian island. As he points out, nature is 'full of death and disease and failure and decline. It isn't all butterflies, sunshine and healing, is it? In my last book, I was trying to make it more complicated: nature can be lonely. Nature can be too quiet. It can be too isolated. It can lead to you not being in the right place. And nature itself is broken, so it can make you depressed. It's falling apart around you. I find it more interesting when it's less about personal redemption and more of a mirror on the big things that I care about: the politics, the economics, what's actually really happening in the world.' Rebanks, who loves Tolstoy and the American writer Wendell Berry and thinks of himself in the tradition of the agrarian radical, is an engaging presence, both off and on the page and, like the best writers on nature, is alive to the frequent contradictions in portraying it in either fiction or nonfiction. Helen Macdonald, too, whose prize-winning H Is for Hawk has been made into a film with Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson, is acutely aware of the expectations we bring to the genre. 'Nature is considered to be the one place free of human artifice, the place where deep universal truths can be uncovered that are not to do with us,' Macdonald says, 'which, of course, is bullshit. That's not the case. We put all our deepest human meanings into nature. We sort of force them in there, and then we use them to prove the veracity of our own concepts back at us, which is what nature writing does all the time.' Macdonald highlights a literary-critical tradition that is useful in understanding both the success of The Salt Path and the reaction to its alleged departures from fact. 'Tramp' or 'vagabonding' literature, which flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries, was by its nature highly individualistic and accepted to contain fabrications; it encompassed writing by those who were marginalised from society, and those, like George Orwell, who put themselves in that position in order to analyse societal structures. It's a world away from contemporary memoir and the idea that nature can be instrumental in making us feel better. So is the genre now facing an existential crisis? Is there still room in the market for stories of journeys into the wilderness, complete with a healing narrative? For Jessica Lee, author of books for both adults and children and the founder of The Willowherb Review, which ran from 2018 to 2022 and aimed to provide a platform for writers of colour, the issues raised by The Salt Path furore present us with an opportunity to explore innovative ways of writing about nature. 'If we're talking about wanting to write about the natural world,' Lee says, 'we can't get rid of ourselves. We can't write ourselves out of the narratives; we're the ones telling the story. But what we can do is allow the world to inform the shape that we take.' That means resisting the idea of linear progression, or redemptive arcs, in favour of the cyclical and the messy. 'The personal, with us at the centre, can be the door that opens the story. But then we really need to be very proactively seeking to undo that the second we've opened that door.' Meanwhile, the fallout from such microscopic attention to a huge bestseller offers us a window into the realities of nature publishing, where experimentation and complexity persist, but often do so without the resources afforded to more commercially appealing narratives. A salutary lesson, perhaps, but not one likely to deter the most adventurous and committed of those attempting to survey our threatened environment and to capture both its wonders and its fragility.
Time of India
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Lost, loved, or starting over? These 10 books will hold your hand
Your 20s are not just about figuring out what you want to do, but also about understanding who you really are. These years bring first jobs, heartbreaks, quiet confusions, and bold beginnings. Through all this, books can serve as gentle guides. Here are ten books that are comforting, powerful, and unforgettable, books that speak to people in their 20s who are learning to move, stay, fall, grow, and start again. Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi Set in a small Tokyo café where customers can travel back in time, only for a few minutes, this Japanese novel is soft and philosophical. It doesn't offer grand life advice, but rather shows how little moments and missed chances shape us. The book reminds us that no matter how far we want to go, we must return to the present before the coffee gets cold. It's a beautiful story about regret, time, and forgiveness. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa In a world that moves fast, this book invites you to slow down. When a heartbroken woman moves into her uncle's secondhand bookstore in Tokyo, she begins to heal quietly through books and calm routines. There are no dramatic twists, only quiet comfort. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Giao dịch vàng CFDs với sàn môi giới tin cậy IC Markets Tìm hiểu thêm Undo If your 20s ever feel lost or loud, this book teaches you how stillness can also be strength. The Defining Decade by Meg Jay Written by a clinical psychologist, this book explains why your 20s matter more than you think. It covers relationships, careers, and identity with stories from real patients. It's direct, honest, and motivating. Not everyone likes advice books, but this one is worth reading because it respects your intelligence and offers practical tools. The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni A powerful retelling of the Mahabharata from Draupadi's point of view, this novel blends mythology with emotion. It explores destiny, duty, ambition, and feminine strength. For readers in their 20s, it shows how history can be reimagined and how women's voices, often quiet in old stories, deserve to be heard with full force. Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed This book is a collection of real letters from people seeking advice and the compassionate responses from Cheryl Strayed. Her words are warm, wise, and often poetic. You'll find parts that feel like they were written just for you. It's a book to turn to when you don't know what to do next. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho A global favorite, this story of a shepherd who goes in search of his destiny is about more than just adventure. It's about listening to your heart, trusting life's process, and finding meaning in simple things. Your 20s are the right time to read this, not because it gives answers, but because it helps you ask better questions. Educated by Tara Westover This memoir traces the author's journey from a strict, survivalist upbringing in rural Idaho to earning a PhD from Cambridge University. It's about breaking free from limiting beliefs and finding your voice. It teaches that education is not just about books, but about learning how to think for yourself. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig If you've ever thought, 'What if I had chosen differently?' this novel will move you deeply. The story follows Nora, who is given the chance to try alternate versions of her life. It gently explores regret, purpose, and hope. You'll walk away from it feeling a bit more accepting of your choices and your past. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson With its bold title and blunt advice, this book may seem like it's just trying to be cool. But it offers a deeper message: Focus your energy on what truly matters. In your 20s, when you often try to do and be everything, this book reminds you to choose your battles. Normal People by Sally Rooney This quiet, intense novel captures how complicated relationships can be, especially in young adulthood. It doesn't judge its characters for being unsure or imperfect. Instead, it shows how love, distance, and communication shape who we become. It's a novel that doesn't shout, but leaves a lasting echo. You won't find all the answers in books. But the right ones will help you pause, reflect, and feel less alone. These ten titles are not just about entertainment. They are mirrors, maps, and sometimes soft blankets, reminding you that growth can be slow and still beautiful. So read widely. Reread when needed. Let stories help you carry the weight of becoming.
Tatler Asia
13-05-2025
- Tatler Asia
10 books about travel that will spark your wanderlust
2. 'Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail' by Cheryl Strayed Above 'Wild From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail' by Cheryl Strayed (Photo: Vintage) Cheryl Strayed's memoir is more than a tale of hiking boots and blisters. Traversing over a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail alone, she unpacks grief, failure and the slow, healing rhythm of putting one foot in front of the other. Wild stands out among books about travel for its raw honesty—this is not a romanticised journey, but one that earns its transformation mile by gruelling mile. 3. 'The Alchemist' by Paulo Coelho Above 'The Alchemist' by Paulo Coelho (Photo: HarperOne) Paulo Coelho's philosophical tale of a young Andalusian shepherd who dreams of treasure in the Egyptian pyramids has become a global touchstone for spiritual seekers. Along the way, Santiago meets desert dwellers, merchants and mystics. While some roll their eyes at its aphorisms, it remains an enduring reminder that the most compelling books about travel are often the ones that take you inward as much as outward. 4. 'The Lost City of Z' by David Grann Above 'The Lost City of Z' by David Grann (Photo: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group) A gripping blend of biography and historical adventure, this non-fiction narrative follows British explorer Percy Fawcett's obsessive quest for a mythical city in the Amazon. David Grann interweaves Fawcett's journals with his own trek into the jungle, revealing the line between ambition and madness. For fans of perilous expeditions, this is one of those books about travel that reads like a fever dream. 5. 'A Year in Provence' by Peter Mayle Above 'A Year in Provence' by Peter Mayle (Photo: Vintage) Peter Mayle's memoir of buying a farmhouse in Provence is less about adventure and more about immersion. With dry humour and a keen eye for detail, he chronicles the region's eccentric locals, seasonal rituals and culinary pleasures. The book doesn't shy away from the bureaucratic and logistical headaches of relocation, making it a grounded yet charming addition to any collection of books about travel. 6. 'A Cook's Tour' by Anthony Bourdain Above 'A Cook's Tour' by Anthony Bourdain (Photo: Bloomsbury Publishing) Long before he became a global icon, Anthony Bourdain wrote A Cook's Tour —a globe-spanning, sharp-tongued food memoir that proves cuisine is one of the most intimate ways to know a place. From the markets of Vietnam to a Russian military base, his prose is as raw and unsentimental as the meals he describes. It's one of the few books about travel that reads with the bite of noir fiction. 7. 'The God of Small Things' by Arundhati Roy Above 'The God of Small Things' by Arundhati Roy (Photo: Random House Trade Paperbacks) While not a travelogue, Arundhati Roy's Booker Prize-winning novel is steeped in place. Set in Kerala, India, it offers a lush, tragic portrait of childhood, caste and forbidden love. The setting is inseparable from the narrative, described with such sensuality and specificity that readers unfamiliar with the region will feel they've been dropped into its monsoon-soaked heart. This is a literary reminder that some books about travel don't involve a plane ticket. 8. 'Under the Tuscan Sun' by Frances Mayes Above 'Under the Tuscan Sun' by Frances Mayes (Photo: Bantam) Frances Mayes' memoir of restoring an abandoned villa in Tuscany walks a fine line between reverie and reality. Her love of Italian food, landscape and architecture spills across the pages, but so do her frustrations with Italian bureaucracy and renovation woes. Less about travel and more about building a life abroad, it remains a favourite among readers seeking books about travel that blend aspiration with authenticity. 9. 'Into the Wild' by Jon Krakauer Above 'Into the Wild' by Jon Krakauer (Photo: Anchor Books) Christopher McCandless' fatal journey into the Alaskan wilderness has become mythologised—equal parts cautionary tale and manifesto. Jon Krakauer's investigation raises questions about freedom, recklessness and the modern craving for solitude. As far as books about travel go, it's one of the most haunting, probing not only what it means to venture far from home, but why some people feel they must. 10. 'Eat, Pray, Love' by Elizabeth Gilbert Above 'Eat, Pray, Love' by Elizabeth Gilbert (Photo: Riverhead Books) Often imitated, occasionally derided and widely beloved, Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir traces her post-divorce pilgrimage through Italy, India and Bali. Though it sparked a wave of self-discovery tourism, the book itself is self-aware, funny and emotionally intelligent. It's a reminder that books about travel can serve as both map and mirror, showing not just where we might go, but who we might become along the way.
Yahoo
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Writing as Architecture: Notes on Building vs. Writing Your Memoir
Before I began writing, I imagined every writer began at the beginning and laid down the tracks of their story in one clean take. And perhaps there are writers out there who do just that. But I have personally found the writing process to be more physical than intellectual. (9 Things I've Learned Writing a Memoir.) In the beginning, we are surveying the land of possibility, searching for firm ground that might support the story we want to tell. We start digging trenches to test that ground. Perhaps a question rises from the sea of possible questions. It grabs hold of us and doesn't let go. The first question that grabbed me as I was writing my memoir, My Mother in Havana, was why, at age 49—30 years after I'd lost my mother—I missed her more than ever. And why that missing was calling me to Cuba—a country neither she nor I were from. The lines and angles that connected my story with the island's felt both impossible and inevitable. It would take the writing of My Mother in Havana—a memoir about traveling to Cuba to find my mother among their gods and ghosts and mother saints—for that geometry to click into place. And that writing process felt more akin to building than it did to writing. We are sensory creatures, taking in the world around us and translating those bits of sensory experience into meaning, which means that when we write we are constantly deconstructing and reconstructing the world in a way that makes meaning both for us and for our reader. As I found my way into the architecture of My Mother in Havana, I studied memoirs like Cheryl Strayed's Wild and Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk that seemed to adhere to this building principle. I was particularly interested in the way Strayed structured her book so that each chapter begins on the Appalachian Trail, a decision that creates the foundation upon which the reader moves along the narrative of that arduous hike while allowing Strayed to set the posts that frame its themes of grief and loss, motherhood, and survival. Similarly, all but one chapter of My Mother in Havana begins on my pilgrimage to Cuba. I poured that foundation in a mad fever, laying down the narrative that led me from sacred dance to séance, sacrifice to pilgrimage. But there were also multiple layers of backstory I needed to introduce my reader to: who my mother had been; why her death had plagued me for so long; how my grief over her loss had morphed over the years. And why I was looking for answers in a country and spiritual experience so far from my own. Click to continue. As I wrote my way into those themes, I scoured family letters for backstory; puzzled over how and where to insert memories of my mother into the more linear narrative of my trip to Cuba. Devoured books about the mythology and practices of Santería and the Afro-Cuban gods known as the oricha. I made numerous trips to Cuba to scour archives and deepen my understanding of the rituals that lie at the heart of this book. I laid down these materials like a brick layer lays down bricks, or a teacher lays down transparencies—with each new layer illuminating and building upon what lies beneath it. An Incomplete List of Materials to Try as You Build Your Memoir: Memory Photographs Letters Genealogy & family lore Timelines Interviews Archival research Immersion into your subject matter Image & Motifs Narrative Lyricism Inquiry & Speculation We live in times that privilege speed and efficiency, doing vs. being. But there is a beauty, even a subversiveness, in allowing ourselves to take our time. As we try out different materials, we trust that the ways they'll find their way to one another will lead much deeper than the surface of any single narrative. And it is often only after the writer turns off the conscious part of their writing brain—say to take a nap or go for a walk—that the new arrangement comes. At first our manuscript looks like a big mess, and perhaps this is one of the most challenging aspects of writing—to resist simplification. Turn off the part of our brain that craves instant results and lean into the mess, climb the ladders of our scaffolding to survey our work in progress, move or add walls and plumbing as necessary. Make room for the process to take as long as it needs to take. What keeps our work from staying a mess are the foundation and walls we've put in place, and the patterns and repetitions that emerge from and support that framework. And so, once we've waded into the mess of possibility that is our manuscript comes the time to seek pattern and connection, and prune away any element that detracts from those patterns. The first drafts of My Mother in Havana resembled a cross between a Pinterest and a forensic murder board. I wrote themes and images on index cards and Post-It notes. Arranged and rearranged them across pinboards and floors. With each revision, I found myself making choices—saying yes to images I believed were central to the architecture of the writing, and no to those that led the reader away from that center. There is something intuitive and dare I say magical about this process. You must trust that all those carefully placed note cards and Post-Its are leading somewhere. Because, at the end of the day, the beauty of building vs. writing is the element of surprise. Whether it's a poem or a book-length memoir, both the writer and the reader enter the piece not knowing how these seemingly-competing materials and patterns will resolve themselves. And then, if you're lucky, somehow, both impossibly and inevitably, they do. Check out Rebe Huntman's here: Bookshop | Amazon (WD uses affiliate links)
