Travel writing
When literature's worst genre is not completely the worst
Tuesday afternoon, I visited a class at UCLA to talk to a dozen-plus undergraduates. The subject was travel writing. Beforehand, the professor and I commiserated over the things we dislike about the genre. When there’s no story, but a lot of homilies. When the conceit is extra contrived. When clichés roll past like cloud cover, nerves sublimated for peak sublime: epiphanies in foreign markets, pithy wisdom from artisans.
“A step back in time…”
“Authentic luxury…”
Remember when Paul Theroux was a household name?
I say all of this as a writer for travel magazines, also as someone who loves to read travel magazines. When I was kid, Tim Cahill’s stories for Outside were some of the first magazine pieces I read that both excited me and made me laugh, made me want to take adventures. If The Atlantic wants to publish 10,000 words on trying to find the best free restaurant bread, I’m in.
Still, a lot of travel writing doesn’t hold up over time. Put a few decades on a piece and what’s true can get outweighed by what’s off, editorialized, racist, all the locals cast for backdrop. Perhaps the most to hope for is the writing style to hold up, and there’s a small picture, postcard-like, of a time gone by. Diaries do well; the Patrick Leigh Fermor books are good for that. Apparently, Donald Richie’s The Inland Sea, not so much.
Maybe it’s why the best travel writing isn’t classified as such. “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” by Ariel Levy, for example. The story is about a miscarriage and a marriage shattering—it’s not about what the title suggests. But in a way it also includes the best aspects of travel writing, just on a sorrowful path.
People were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was pleased with myself. I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi Desert pregnant, just as, at twenty-two, I’d liked the idea of being the kind of girl who’d go to India by herself. And I liked the idea of telling my kid, “When you were inside me, we went to see the edge of the earth.”
Reading it the first time, I remember feeling transported on numerous paths all at once. Harrowing, moving, gripping. There’s adventure, extreme tragedy, transformation. The story isn’t about Mongolia at all; it’s about what happens to Levy amid the setting’s indifference, which feels like one of the truer things travel writing can pinpoint, how a place exposes a person, not the other way around.
“Thanksgiving came and went,” Levy writes. “There were rolling brownouts when everything went dark and still. I lay in my bed and ate Snickers and drank little bottles of whiskey from the minibar while I watched television programs that seemed as strange and bleak as my new life.”
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What the what
“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly essay from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, plus a monthly travel-lust ballyhoo.
Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ, a contributor at Travel + Leisure, and the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
For magazine articles, bio, contact info: rosecransbaldwin.com.
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