Elisabeth Eaves

It's really, really, really hard not to write off Elisabeth Eaves as an insufferable brat. She whines consistently about her inability to feel at home pretty much anywhere on the planet and flees in the other direction of anything she finds suspiciously boring or domestic or stable. Wanderlust is a bit misleading, I was surprised to discover that a good chunk of the book is devoted to her romantic relationships. It should've been subtitled: Love Affairs in Five Continents

There's an air of condescension for us poor folk without the financial means or ambition to travel worldwide that permeates every chapter and can be hard to get by when she's pretty much talking about you, the reader.

As someone who loves to travel, I was expecting more vivid descriptions of where she's been, what she ate and what she saw but she provides only a handful of some colorful, introspective examples mostly during her time in Egypt and sometimes while on a remote beach or hiking in the jungle. Her narrative is a bit robotic with some pages wasted on how she got from point A to point B with little regard for her personal impressions of those destinations. Really, she could've been in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa because it didn't really matter.

Often, I found myself mentally screaming: Oh grow up already. You're in Peru, thousands of feet above seawater with access to brutally awesome hiking trails and stunning ancient Incan remains and you're whining, again, about a boy?!

Still, she's self-aware about her flip-floppy emotions and "gypsy eccentric status" (well put) and that's a refreshing acknowledgement that prevented me from totally giving up on her.

Despite all this, Eaves talent for travel writing is undeniable, I just wished I had read some of her other more travel specific work (for example her piece of Seville Flamenco dancing). Her analogies and metaphors can be charming. Sometimes not very robust, but it leads the reader beautifully - as if she were telling me her abridged life story over dinner. I have to remind myself, Wanderlust is a memoir based on her explorations as a 20-something kid then later into her 30's and hey, we're not all wise scholars at that age. But the explorations were mostly of a sexual, romantic variety and although she tries to explain the connection to travel, I really don't see it.

I really wanted to love Wanderlust because I felt like we could have been kindred spirits but I felt like I was enjoying her travels more than she did.… (meer)

This book is everything I don't usually choose in a book: published in the last 5 years, travel memoir, written by a young woman, in a separate section in the bookstore, recommended in Vogue magazine, etc...

This makes me realize that I have snob tendencies and that I should be ashamed. Granted, I can't help that I like the writings of dead, white European men; maybe that's who I was in my past life. But when I looked at this book in the Vogue books section, I actually read the summary twice and found myself intrigued. I blame the emotional hardship I was going through and I found myself relating to this woman. So I took a gamble and decided to go with my gut and purchase this book. And I'm glad I did.

The book is about Elizabeth Eaves wanderlust; her desire for satiation in both travel and love. Now, if someone had described that book to me with that line, I would have said "no, thank you", so I feel bad that I'm using that as my plot line, but there is a reason that she has written a book and I have not. I was instantly hooked with her writing and her compelling storytelling, relating to us snippets of her life as she travels around the world: Egypt, Yemen, Papa New Guinea, Australia, France, England (not in this order).

I followed her journey as she talked about the satisfaction she gets from traveling, from escaping the norm and trite urban rituals like getting a career and getting married. But as the story progresses, she starts to question why she is how she is. Why the need for continuously escaping? Why the need to constantly find a man to be with, only to feel the need to escape when they express longing for her?

It was a great story because this isn't about a pathetic girl (as I feared it might be) who is doing everything against her nature just to try and prove a point. Instead it's a girl who is actually acting as she truly desires and the traveling is her creating her norm, her world.

So, again, I'm very happy to have read this. I did find myself relating of course, going through the same concerns that maybe we're ruining our own lives by always escaping and not choosing the same path as the others. That perhaps this is all a series of bad choices and we're just digging a deeper hole. Although I'm over it now, I also had a moment in my life where men were there for me to do as I pleased. I was honest with them about my intentions, thus there was no deception, and I think that's what I enjoyed about Eaves. there was no deception and no acting like someone else. It was a moment in her life that she needed to live and she knew there was no reason to make excuses for it.

The only part where I waned a bit was when she spent her time in Australia as that turned a bit too much into the stereotypical "boys and girls with dreads, in dirty hostels with no dreams whatsoever" idea I have of young people traveling.

In any case, a real pleasure to read this.… (meer)