I recently picked up ‘I should have stayed at home: The worst trips of great writers’. It’s an anthology of anecdotes from different writers on the worst trips they’ve ever been on. Among the writers featured are Pico Iyer, Isabel Allende, Paul Thereoux, and many more.
Isabelle Allende writes about going around Europe on $1 a day, while Pico Iyer and a companion dodge sexual predators in Egypt. In another chapter, a writer talks about an impromptu trip around the world by a US president and the toll it took on his press corps. It’s more than little cautionary tales while on the road, it is, in essence, the best of the worst.
After all, as Mary Morris says in her introduction, “But it is not our comforts we remember–or that anyone else cares to remember for that matter. What is memorable is misery. It is our dismay, our disbelief, and the fact that we made it through. There is some perverse natural law that makes adversity lead to inspiration.”
Oh whew, finally reached the halfway point of this meme!
Part of the 30 Day Writing Meme. Next is Day 15: A fanfic.