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In light of International Women’s Day, Vela Magazine is collecting suggestions for its “Great Nonfiction by Women” List.

We want to know which women writers you like “best,” who you think belongs on those reading lists and what works you wish got more attention. Sure, we all love Joan Didion, but who are her literary daughters and granddaughters writing the essay?

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This one, by Sarah Todd, is about the “just been slimed in my heart” feeling of realizing your passport has expired the day before you leave on an international trip.

Todd relates what it’s like waiting in line—and sharing McDonald’s hash browns—with other desperate travelers in need of eleventh-hour bureaucratic grace:

There was a special, sheepish camaraderie in the early-morning line. We all understood that we’d messed up. Now, filled with humility, we were throwing ourselves on the mercy of the U.S. government. Ron Swanson would have completely hated us.

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We were in Plovdiv for a week for two reasons: It was cheaper to fly into Sofia than it was to Athens, where my boyfriend would begin a month-long fellowship in Greece, and I had always wanted to visit Bulgaria.

Sofia was our base. Sofia’s a melancholy city, full of post-Soviet atmosphere, communist block housing, stray dogs. It was the kind of city I was born in, but did not remember well. It rained almost every day we were there, but we had also arrived during a joyous time when the schools had graduated their seniors. Just imagine a weekend-long prom vomiting onto the streets. Limousines and Porsches lined the roads in a city where the average monthly income was equal to three hundred American dollars. Students rode in their cars, honking their horns incessantly, hanging waist-high out of the windows. They screamed, counting down from twelve to one, the grades that they’d passed: tre, dve, edin! Drivers hollered and honked back, shouting their support or frustration at the young men and women dressed up as if going to a gala, costume ball, or strip club. They did not look eighteen. They made me embarrassed of my flip-flops and twenty-dollar dresses that I usually took great pride in.

But each day in Sofia was ultimately a day closer to Plovdiv. Plovdiv was, where I was told, my maternal grandfather was born.

My paternal grandfather was born by the Black Sea, in Varna. He died when I was three. I only know him through pictures and brief appearances on home videos, where he sits, thinning, fading, ghostlike on the couch. He had a face like Al Pacino, but Pacino in ten more years. We wanted to visit Varna, too, but it was out of our way. One day I will return to Bulgaria for him.

My boyfriend (now my fiancé) knows that the love of my life is my mother, and I have always known that the love of my mother’s life was her father. She was raised on his knee, his only daughter. He was my Karo papik, a tall, heavy man who cried when giving toasts, whose speeches always ended with, “May we not decrease, but multiply.” He would palm two dollar bills in my hands on my birthdays, fives, tens, as I grew older. His gifts were always separate from my grandmother’s, a secret. He trembled as he handed them to me. There was so much love in his body, and though he lost his shape, lost so much weight, near the end of his life, he still cried when he watched the Bulgarian Olympians march down the Athens stadium, cried when Bulgarian music came on the international radio. My mother was moved when I told her I’d be visiting Plovdiv. Tell me everything, she said. Don’t you dare forget anything.

So in Plovdiv, on our first day, we dropped off our bags at the Hotel Odeon, and began walking.

Waiting for my crepe, I noticed a woman in her mid-forties or fifties, standing with three other women, just a few feet ahead of us. She caught my eye, smiled widely, almost as if in recognition, and suddenly approached. She had dark hair, a Slavic face, round eyes, a sharp nose and jaw. She touched my arm and started to speak excitedly in Bulgarian. I smiled dumbly. I pointed at my chest and shook my head. “I’m sorry. I speak English.” She leaned back, a question now in her eyes as well as on her lips. I kept shaking my head. “Sorry, sorry,” I repeated. She smiled once more, briefly, hesitantly, her round eyes, just as big as mine, filled with a strange disappointment. She walked back to her group, and as they resumed their conversation, they turned to look at me every now and then.

How do describe that moment, but simply: I felt so stupid, like I had rejected a sign from the universe. I told my boyfriend: “I should’ve said something in Armenian. Maybe they were Armenian. Maybe they recognized me.”

He laughed, glancing at them. “Why would they recognize you? You’ve never been here.”

“My mother,” I said.

“Didn’t you say your mother only visited here once as a young girl? And wasn’t she like eight?”

“That’s not the point,” I said, folding my arms across my chest.

“Maybe that woman was the tourist, and thought you were the local. Maybe she wanted to know just how good this palachinki place is that we’ve been standing here for fifteen minutes.”

“Ha, ha.” But I wondered if that was even possible—could I pass for Bulgarian? In Sofia, as I walked through Maria Luisa Boulevard toward Vitosha, past churches, mosques, and synagogues, past ciganis singing for change in front of the Central Market Hall, I was surprised by just how difficult it was to identify the ethnic groups. Sofia is home to Turks, Armenians, Roma, and Jews beside ethnic Bulgarians. But it was the Roma I could most easily identify—they were darker than the rest, and they were the ones singing. But if a Bulgarian, a Turk, and an Armenian were walking down the street toward me, out of the joke of my dreams, I could not tell you who was who. This was a first for me. In LA, I can spot us a mile away. In Germany, I could show you a Turk or two. But here, for whatever reason, my judgment was clouded, I could not see as clearly. Perhaps, I figured, that was because there wasn’t as great of a difference as I thought. Maybe in Plovdiv, I could be confused for a Bulgarian.

And is this not the traveler’s dream? Why we seek out in our guidebooks the most local haunts, the holes-in-the-wall? So we can feel one with the group, as if we belong, to deceive ourselves into believing that tourism isn’t inherently an uncomfortable experience for everyone involved. I had a friend say once that you could “do” Prague in three days. Three. I was there for a month and it was not enough. I like to get familiar with a city, as intimately as possible so as to rid myself of the terrible suspicion that I’m only exploiting the city for a few pictures, anecdotes. For a story to tell my mother, and all of the world. To be confused for a local means having as clean a conscience as possible when traveling.

And to be confused for Bulgarian, especially! Land of my grandfathers’ births. The country that gave life to my mother’s greatest love. For a second I felt so aware of myself, my family, our collective history. It was a magical moment, one that all tourists want. That Eat, Pray, Love reaffirmation of the meaning of life. A silly tourist pipe-dream. Because a second later, I was back to where I started. Confused. Oddly hurt. What did this woman want to say to me? Why could I not understand it? Perhaps she knew my grandfather, perhaps she liked my shirt.

We finally got my crepe and walked on. On our trek towards the Old Town, I carried with me a new loss. I had failed. Failed what exactly, I didn’t know, but in less than thirty minutes, I’d fail again.

* * *

I was staring at a bulletin posted on the graffiti-ed exterior white wall of what I’d soon learn was an Armenian school. For now I was perplexed only by the poster. It was a notice of death. I had seen these before in Bosnia, where my boyfriend was born, and where we traveled together the previous summer. I thought it was a Slavic tradition. But the death notice I was now staring at in Plovdiv was in Armenian. There was a black and white photo of a young man in its center, and a brief obituary below, in our curious print. In appearance, Armenian script resembles that of Georgia, our geographic neighbor, and, oddly, after a few drinks, Ethiopian. I could read Armenian—spent a lifetime at my mother’s dining table on the weekends, being forced to read the books that we had brought with us from the Old Country. Still, the words looked so strange to me, the meaning not coming together, until I squinted, peering closer, the man’s face blurring.

My boyfriend tapped me on the shoulder. “Is that a church?”

I took two steps back and looked up, following his finger. He was pointing at the round dome of a church, barely visible behind the white wall.

“Vedran,” I said, taking a few more steps, “I think we’re right outside the Armenian Quarter.”

I had read that there was a sizable population of Armenians in Old Town Plovdiv, and, as in Jerusalem, there was even a designated “quarter.” It was on our agenda: we had hoped to find it at some point, to, I don’t know, take pictures? All I know is that I wanted to see it, and then see what happened once I got there.

We followed the white wall down the narrow cobbled lane, curving left and right until finally we arrived at the entrance of the walled compound that was marked with a poster out front. “The Armenian School,” it said in Bulgarian and English. It also professed that the school was the first secular one in the city, established in 1834.

And my first thought: Did Grandpa go here?

I stood there, at the bottom of the steps, staring at this poster. And then I heard it. Voices speaking in Armenian. My heart thudded. I turned around to see an elderly couple approaching, speaking to each other in an accented Armenian, their arms hooked. They took their time climbing the stairs, the women stepping on each stair with both feet, pausing, and then tackling the next, her husband beside her, vocal in his support. At the top stair, another man appeared—he must have come from the compound, I figured, which was, only moments before, gated. He was middle-aged, salt-and-pepper hair tied in a low ponytail, and wore a crème-colored suit. He shook both of their hands and thanked them for coming.

Armenians, I thought! Armenians! Armenians! Armenians!

I didn’t wonder why this was more wonderful and frightening than being surrounded by Armenians in LA, where I was raised. Then I was only thinking, Armenians, Armenians, Armenians!

Suddenly, it was as if the clock struck Armenian. They appeared outside of their pastel-colored houses, coming down the road, past the cherry trees and house-museums, climbing these stairs, and there I was, standing at the foot, mesmerized by it all.

Then, just as they had appeared, they were gone, vanished inside this compound. I watched it for a minute or two before Vedran said, “What are we doing? Let’s go inside.”

My legs were shaking.

The gate wasn’t closed, and we entered through it quickly, pretending we knew where we were going. We took an immediate right because to our left was a building, its doorway occupied by Armenians, the same pony-tailed figure we had seen minutes before now talking to two old men.

We stood maybe twenty feet from them, and when the man turned to look at us, I turned away. In front of me was the church. Surp Gevork was written across the archway. Below it, an image of Christ, the text around it, translating to: I am the door. But the literal door of the church was closed. If the Armenians weren’t going to church services, what were they all doing here at four in the afternoon?

“You could ask, you know,” my boyfriend said, nodding at the men casually glancing over at us in between smokes of cigarette.

“Let’s explore,” I told him instead.

Next to the church was a khatchkar, or Armenian cross-stone, engraved with a large cross surrounded by flowers, interlaces, and a curved peacock resting on top of a rosette. The khatchkar was mounted on a granite platform, which was inscribed in Bulgarian on the left and Armenian on the right, both saying the same thing: that 1.5 million innocent Armenians were killed during the twentieth century’s first genocide.

Nearby was the actual primary school mentioned on the poster outside. There was a basketball court in front of it, and it was this basketball court that did me in. I knew that even if my grandfather went here, that he never played basketball—was there such a thing in 1930s Bulgaria?—and this thought alone was devastating. Something was here now that wasn’t here before, when my grandfather was alive and young and lovely. I started crying. And I kept crying. I kept wandering from the basketball court, to the school, the memorial, the church, and back again. I couldn’t stop. My mascara was running, my nose was running, and I knew the men were still there by the unnamed little yellow building, watching me.

“Go talk to them. You know you want to talk to them.”

“What would I even say?” I bawled.

“How about, ‘Did anyone know Garbis Voskanyan?’”

I shook my head and wiped my arm across my nose. “You don’t understand. I can’t!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know!”

Vedran looked at me pityingly. “You know you’re going to regret it if you don’t.”

“Don’t you think I know that?”

“Then go do it.”

“I’m too emotional right now,” I said, trying to calm myself, put into words what I was feeling. But frankly, I was embarrassed to ask if anyone here knew my grandpa. Another Diaspora Armenian, they’d think, seeking connection. I knew how silly I was being, how unoriginal. It made me uncomfortable. It made me turn away from the powerful emotions building inside of me, doubt it all. I grew hard. Maybe they’d pity me and give me false information, I began to think. Maybe they’d try to get me to donate money I didn’t have.

“We’ll come back. We’ll come back once I call my mom and get more information.”

“More information about what?”

“I don’t know. We’ll come back. I have to call my mom.”

I wiped my face and took a big breath, started to walk towards the gate. But there was no need for composure. The men had already disappeared into the building. We were alone.

We went down the stairs silently and began trying to find our way back to our hotel. I picked a cherry off a low-hanging branch, and swirled it in my hand. My uncle—my mother’s brother—had told me to taste the fruit that hung in the Plovdiv trees, that it tasted like nothing else in the world, but I had no water with me to wash it. As I was setting it down in a raised flowerbed we passed, Vedran stopped me. He picked his own cherry, then put it in my hand. I took a picture of it, though I didn’t know why. Together, we placed them in the flowerbed, where only a few pebbles decorated the soil. The cherries were without stems, and they looked like a swollen heart resting on the dirt.

A few moments later, we saw three men waiting outside a house, as another was locking it up.

“Faster, old man. We’re already late,” the one in the blue vest said.

“You are older than me, bidza,” the houseowner replied. They were speaking in Armenian. As they walked past us, I scrambled to find my camera.

In the picture I took, the first one I showed my mother when I returned home to LA, there are four old men walking down a narrow cobbled street of Plovdiv. The branches of the cherry trees hang low above them, and the Armenian compound is visible in front. One man with shock-white hair, in a grey jacket, has his hands clasped behind him. Any one of them could’ve been my grandfather, but him especially. Those hands. When I showed it to my mother, she understood, and went to bathroom to cry in private.

* * *

 “I don’t understand what you’re saying, Mom. Are you saying Grandpa wasn’t born in Plovdiv?”

We had gone back to the hotel and I was lying on my stomach, with the laptop in front of me, my mother’s face on the screen. The internet connection was bad; I kept restarting Skype every few minutes, but the message was clear and unchanging. It appeared that my grandfather was born in Nova Zagora, an hour’s drive from Plovdiv, a drive we weren’t planning to take, a city we didn’t even know existed.

I had called to tell her how surreal that experience was inside the Armenian Quarter, but now she was saying that she had spoken to her mother recently about my trip, and my grandmother had paused and then told her that she didn’t think he was born in Plovdiv after all.

“But she was the one who told us he was from Plovdiv, wasn’t she?” I asked, confused.

My mother nodded. She seemed both tired—I had woken her up—and excited. She was talking fast but kept rubbing her eyes, like she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. But I was the one who just had a deeply emotional experience that now was tainted.

“I thought it was Plovdiv, too. But she seemed so sure of it, that it’s not. She said the name of the real city just popped up in her head, and she knew, without a doubt, that that’s where your papik was born.”

“All this time,” I asked, my voice getting loud, “and she didn’t even know where her husband was from?”

She frowned and put up her hand. “Naira.”

I looked over the screen at my boyfriend, sitting on the armchair, watching me, mouthing, “What, what?” I threw my hands in the air in a helpless gesture.

“But Mom, you went to Plovdiv as a kid. You remember that?”

“Of course I know I went to Plovdiv, but your grandmother says that that’s where your grandpa’s aunt lived. We had all gone to visit her, apparently.”

“But you don’t remember her, right?”

She paused. “No, I don’t.”

“Mom, Grandma’s getting old. I’m sure she recalled the past more accurately twenty years ago than she does now.”

“Sweetheart, I don’t see how this changes anything. But if this really matters to you, then why don’t you just go ask the people you saw today if they heard of him? He used to work for a prominent blacksmith, I think.”

Yeah, I thought, and ended the call. I’ll get my answer.

* * *

I put off the visit to the Armenian Quarter until our last day in Plovdiv. We have time, I kept telling Vedran. Old Town Plovdiv is relatively small, and we’d walk past the same restaurants, the same museums maybe six to seven times a day. I found things to do. We visited the Art Gallery & Museum Philippopolis on three separate occasions: the first to view the art of the two-story Hadji Aleko House—the paintings inside as well as the stunning design and architecture of the house, with its big parlor and ellipsoidal ceiling; the second time to drink frappes at its outside café, beside the fallen magnificent trunk of a tree which seemed to split into four fingers, like an open palm that overlooked the entire town; and third, to talk with the gallery guide about the old Bulgarian movie “After the End of the World,” in which a Jewish boy and an Armenian girl fall in love in the poorest neighborhood of Plovdiv.

But then it was time. We found our way, navigating the cobbled streets, passing the stray cats that served as guards to the souvenir shops (and served to differentiate Plovdiv from Sofia). We walked past the little flowerbed where we had deposited our two cherries three days before. We stopped there, amazed, and incredibly moved. The cherries were no longer there, but now tiny basil-like leaves sprouted from the flowerbed, some of them already revealing their red petals. I kissed Vedran. We continued.

The Armenian compound was pretty vacant. There was no hint of the large group that was present a few days before, only five children now playing basketball in the courtyard, four boys and a tall girl, and a woman who sat on a bench, shouting in Bulgarian at one of them. I didn’t know what to do, so we watched them for a while, until someone who looked like a security guard exited the school door. I thought he was going to ask us to leave, but he only sat down next to the woman, didn’t even glance at us. I hesitated, thinking about what I was going to say. Vedran nudged me forward.

In Armenian, I asked the guard if we could go inside the church. He looked like he didn’t understand, so I repeated my question. He was old, wore glasses. He looked so kind, like someone I could know. He put up his hand, his five fingers outstretched, then returned inside the building.

Vedran and I took a seat on the bench and watched the children some more. The girl was blonde, the boys, dark. She played well. I felt pride rise to my throat. Five minutes, I thought. He was probably going to get the keys, someone to help us. I grabbed Vedran’s hand.

Then another man came out of the building, a little younger. He waved his hand in a follow-me motion, and we obliged. The church was small, very small, and smelled the way all Orthodox churches smell, like something damp. I examined the peeling walls, the murals of biblical scenes faded, colors quieted. I passed the baptismal font, and there, the man finally spoke up. I strained to hear him, to understand, but his Armenian was more than just different, not just accented like the elderly couple I had heard climbing the stairs—it was off, it was wrong, it wasn’t fluent or clear. What was happening, I thought. I must’ve looked confused, because finally he mimicked cradling a baby. I nodded and smiled to tell him I understood.

I asked him if I could light a candle, and I blew on my index finger to show him. He nodded and retrieved a cardboard box. I put whatever bills and coins I had on me inside the box and took one candle. I lit it, dug it in the sand, praying for the health of my living family, and for peace and rest for those deceased.

It would be so simple, I thought, staring at the flicker of the flame. Just say his name. Just ask. Just turn around and ask: Do you know a Garbis Voskanyan? He worked for a famous blacksmith. He left for Armenia in 1946 or 1947. He cried at everything.

But would he even understand me? And then, in my chest, in the pit of my stomach, I suddenly recognized the depth of my fear. That, yes, he’d understand, and he’d have an answer, and that answer would change everything. Thinking my grandfather was from here deepened my experience of Plovdiv. I felt closer to the city, to the people, and to my own family. I felt the most comfortable I had ever felt traveling. So often, we travel to abandon the old and discover the new, but it was the reminder of my past here, the remnants of the things and people I left behind, that transformed the cherries of Plovdiv into giant hearts, that changed the faces of strangers into familiar shapes, that made a country I was simply visiting a home.

I looked at Vedran and knew what he was thinking. I smiled, and shook my head. No, I would not regret this. I would not ask. I stepped out of the church, turning around one last time and crossing myself in the Orthodox tradition. I stared at the candle I had lit, then put one foot behind me.

***

Rumpus original art by Russell Christian.

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• PK

With a refreshing mix of honesty and tenderness (he got choked up three times in an hour, talking about his children), McCarthy, who rarely does interviews, opened up about acting, travel, family, and fear.

***

The Rumpus: What prompted you to think you could be a travel writer? Did you always have a writing impulse?

Andrew McCarthy: No, I didn’t write ever. I didn’t read. When I went to school I wasn’t interested in any of that. Then someone gave me The Old Patagonian Express. I read that and it blew my mind, so I started reading more Paul Theroux; then I started traveling and then I started writing. I tried keeping a little journal and that was so pathetic. It was just stupid, so embarrassing for even me to read. Then I began writing down scenes of things that happened and I kept them in a notebook and I did that for years. There was no motivation—it just sort of validated traveling to me. When you travel you’re sort of drifting, and because I would travel for months, I became untethered, and I found that if I wrote a scene, it gave me something to do for an hour and grounded me. I did it for that sake and literally put them in a drawer when I came home.

Rumpus: Was there a learning curve? I mean I’d like to be a great jazz player, but I don’t hear amazing jazz and think, Hey I could do that.

McCarthy: Well if you read a lot of travel magazines you realize a lot of them are crap. So the bar wasn’t that high. But there’s some great travel writing, too. One of the reasons I thought I could do it is because no article captured anything of my own experience of traveling. When I read Paul Theroux, I could tell he’s having an experience. After an editor said that I could go ahead and try to write something, I told him I didn’t know how to write a travel story and he said, “Good.” No other editor would have taken a chance on me. There are a lot of people who have the attitude, “Oh this actor thinks he can write.” I get that all the time. I can smell it in a second, and you come upon it, and you just have to go around it.

Rumpus: Were you able to translate any of your acting knowledge into writing? Are there similarities between the two practices?

McCarthy: The similarities for me are that I’m not good enough to fake things. I couldn’t write about fashion. I genuinely believe travel changes people’s lives. Everything that I write, whatever my story is about, whether it’s about prosciutto in Parma, underneath it is the sensation that this is going to change your life. If I’ve been successful in any way, it’s because people pick up on that. It’s the same thing acting did for me. Acting saved my life. I felt alive in a way I never had before. I felt like I had an answer and a way out of whatever life I had; it gave me direction. They both fuel the same excitement. I knew I could write from that place. I didn’t know what a nut graph was, but I had a passion and an instinct for it.

Rumpus: It seems like there’s two types of travel writing: vacation and real travel.

McCarthy: There is a difference, but I’m a big anti-snob. I can’t stand when people say, “You’re not a traveler, you’re a tourist.” Go and fuck yourself. If you get out of the house, hats off to you. You know what I mean? How many people here have left the country? Not too many. So I mean anybody who gets out of the house, let alone leaves the country? I don’t care if you’re going to the greatest hits of Paris—Notre Dame, and you’re going to go to the Eiffel tower, and then home—fantastic.

Rumpus: Right, because they’re coming up against fear.

McCarthy: You have no idea what fear they’re dealing with. That’s what travel obliterates—it obliterates fear. That Mark Twain line is so brilliant, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness…” My whole soapbox is that America is a wonderful nation but incredibly fearful; we make all our political decisions based on fear. If people went out into the world they’d realize that a guy with a towel around his head isn’t out to get you. Something like 30% of Americans have passports, and they usually use them to go to Canada and Mexico. So anyone who gets out the door has my undying affection.

Rumpus: Do you think being alone is integral to a certain kind of travel? Oddly, some of the most moving parts of this book take place when you’re traveling with family; what’s the distinction?

McCarthy: You often have the experience of each other in the place, as opposed to yourself in the place. By nature I’m a solitary traveler, but by nature I’m a solitary person. I prefer—am most comfortable, most at home—when I’m far away alone. I get that. I’m deeply comfortable there. There’s a great line by Madame de Stael that says travel is “one of the saddest pleasures in life.” There’s no greater feeling than when I have that childish realization that nobody in the world knows where I am. That’s thrilling to me, but it’s also childish. Then, on the other hand, when I’m alone and see something, I think, I wish my kids could see that. You can’t win. They’re just different. I’m glad that I traveled alone first. The only reason people don’t travel alone is because they’re afraid. They think they’ll be lonely, but loneliness is not going to kill you. It’s a different loneliness on the road than at home. Loneliness at home is much more painful. Loneliness on the road has a depth and an expanse where the loneliness at home is an experience of depravation. On the road, you’re tiny, which is an incredible thing.

Rumpus: I noticed in the book when you travel alone, you’re endlessly annoyed by other travelers. I was waiting for you to bond with someone and you didn’t.

McCarthy: Yeah, those fucking people. Well, it happens even here in New York. It has nothing to do with traveling. If I get over myself a little bit, I realize there’s a lot to learn from everybody. It’s more of a life problem that I have than a traveling one. Hopefully it makes for some kind of illuminating conflict in the book. Part of this book is seeing how a loner learns to communicate with other people. It’s not something I’m good at, whether at home or traveling. I just don’t really know how to be with people. I really don’t get it intuitively.

Rumpus: It seems interesting to me that as a loner you’ve had to lead a public life.

McCarthy: It’s very odd. It’s ridiculous, actually. It took me years to realize that I was a loner. It’s like anything: if that’s the position from which you look at the world, that’s the way you think everyone is. Though I think a lot of actors are actually introverts.

Rumpus: Writers are often introverts; maybe that’s part of why you feel comfortable writing, or why you’ve turned towards this path?

McCarthy: I have to say that finding writing was a huge relief. Even when you just say that, I find it relieving. Now it’s just a question of, do I have the abilities and the skills and the “can I think between thoughts enough” to communicate it. But, yeah it’s a relief.

Rumpus: To me my worst nightmare would be to have my glorious anonymity taken from me. Is that another reason you like traveling? To regain a sense of anonymity?

McCarthy: Yes, and when I’m recognized on the road, I’m much more gracious and open than I am here. It’s very interesting. I’m not sure why. I guess I’m more relaxed and therefore more emotionally generous. I became recognizable very early, when I was young, so it formed a lot of my responses to others. I mean, I certainly wasn’t a Kennedy where I was prepped for success—I just knew I couldn’t go to the mall. And suddenly I was getting laid a lot, when a year ago no one would look at me. I was twenty-three and it was awesome, though it was assaulting in a certain way. It would be better to find success in your thirties, when you have a sense of yourself. I was just writing an article about Ireland, and neither countries, nor people, get rich quick gracefully. When Ireland became wealthy it became an awful place, and now that it’s broke, they’ve gone back to themselves and it’s great again.

Rumpus: Traveling seems to magnify some kind of personal or interpersonal conflict one might have. By traveling those issues seem to come into focus.

McCarthy: There’s nowhere to hide. I think people have this wrong idea about traveling. I mean wherever you go, there you are. And if you’re not trying to buy stuff to distract you, then all you have is that thing.  So you’re just left with that one thing in your head and it’s surrounding you. I think that’s a good thing— it helps you deal with whatever that issue is.

Rumpus: I wanted to ask you about change through travel. You said that you don’t change through “a-ha” moments.

McCarthy: Yeah, that’s what my editor said. She wanted to know what happened at the top of Kilimanjaro and I said, “It was fucking cold.” I never see the change in the instant. The biggest a-ha moment of my life was in Spain. I broke down and was sobbing, but I didn’t realize why until I got to the end. I’m not in my life or smart enough to realize when it’s happening to me. I have them, but the dawning takes a while. When I was successful so quickly so young, I didn’t trust it. I much prefer the brick-and-mortar path. With the writing, I knew that I wanted to write as many different publications I could, so that by the time I came out with a book, my critics couldn’t dismiss me so easily as an actor-turned-writer. I was sure I wanted to write, and so by the time I was outed, and someone wanted to exploit it for publicity, I already had won an award and had all these publications.

Rumpus: I can understand the fear of being pigeonholed.

McCarthy: There’s nothing I can do about that. It’s something I learned from acting. I was never in the kinds of movies that I wanted to be in. Only in hindsight did they become these iconic films of a generation. At the time they were not these particularly respected films. Brat Pack was a pejorative term. Now it’s become a term of affection, and the Brat Pack members have longevity that young actors now might now have in twenty years. But yes, it’s a double-edged sword. I get attention from having been in those movies, but I have to redirect the conversation so it’s not just some vanity project. Hopefully my book stands on its own.

Rumpus: Theroux talks about how travel has changed so much, as explored in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, where he revisits his original trip chronicled in his classic, The Great Railway Bazaar. Does the notion of change affect you as a traveler?

McCarthy: I walked the Camino de Santiago 20 years ago, and now the idea of walking it now being able to check in every thirty seconds would be awful. I mean, but things always change. It’s like the movie business. When I arrived, people were like, “You should have been here a couple years ago, it’s really changed. It’s a shame. You should have been here in the 70’s when the auteurs were here, just five years ago. You missed it.” And that was ’82. It’s the same thing. It’s also the first thing I heard when I went to Hawaii in 1986: “You should have been here ten years ago.” You read those great quotes of people saying “our times are so modern now” and you realize [they were] written in 1820. People have always been lamenting change. Yes it’s true, and yet what are you going to do? It’s inevitable that things change, but you still set out anyway.

Rumpus: What about the issue of mortality? So central to travel is the fear of death, yet it doesn’t appear a lot in your book.

McCarthy: I used to be terrified of death. I was terrified of the world. I was terrified of travel. That’s why I travel, because I was so afraid; I stopped being afraid of the world to a degree by traveling. That notion of “I could die here,” that’s what I discovered when I walked across Spain. I was terrified every day. I wanted to see if I could take care of myself, and I found out that I was taken care of somehow. It wasn’t a religious experience but it was a personal, transformative one. The greatest way to overcome fear is to get out of the house, and to get out of the house alone.

Rumpus: Sometimes when people come up against the fear of travel they just don’t do it. What motivated you to push into the fear?

McCarthy: Because fear was not going to stop me from doing what I wanted to do in life. Some famous explorer said, “Brave men never do anything, it’s cowards that discover the world.” It’s absolutely true. I traveled solely because I was afraid.

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I used to think that I couldn’t lose anyone if I photographed them enough.

1.  My sister heard about it first. She told me “it sounds like something you’d like.” Leanne Shapton’s second book, the 2009 Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, is modeled after an auction guide. The reader learns about Doolan and Morris, as individuals and as a couple, through their stuff. The only text in the slim 129 pages is in the descriptions of the items up for auction.  The spine reads “Important Artifacts And…” This is, of course, because the title’s too long to fit. Perhaps it also implies that who the artifacts belong to are of little consequence and that the artifacts could be anything really. They could be yours. The tie you wore once to a funeral and then gave away. The pressed purple flower you never gave your mother.

2.  Souvenirs are anchors to the past. And, the past can lead to a certain brand of sadness. Those who soak in the past tend toward depression. So large is my fear of forgetting that I lug around souvenirs, reminders of where I’ve been and what I’ve done. The problem is that with too much concern for the made thing, the glorified artifact, that spangled souvenir, we can’t see what’s happening right this minute, here.

3.  I don’t collect shot glasses or spoons. I collect photographs. I take them and I hoard them. They’re my favorite souvenirs. I revisit them more than I should.

4.  Most of my traveling is via work. As an English professor, I attend conferences along with fellow academics. For most of my career, I stayed within the confines of the conference hotels. It was a safe world for me, the introverted writer who would much rather imagine the world that waited outside panels of papers and tables of books and name tags hanging from twisted lanyards. The handshaking and the card swapping that happens there is familiar.

This stopped after a conference in St. Louis four years ago. A friend back home desperately tried to encourage me to see the arch. “It’s really something,” he said. I yanked my hotel curtains to the side like rowdy bangs. I could see its underbelly if I really tried. I told him this. He said, “I don’t know what you’re so scared of.”

5.  In 2004, on my Honolulu honeymoon, I bought a charm with my new and impatient husband by my side. It was yellow gold and in the shape of a hibiscus. It was smaller than a penny. I wore it around my neck to remind me to be softer. That I was a wife. Wives are soft. They know how to compromise. I also wore it to remind me of squeezing past hazy mountains in a tour bus and taking a picture of my bride feet in flip flops next to my flip flopped husband’s. I was terrified of forgetting one sip of those first married days.

6.  I met a film actor once. He was in a film that I owned on video. It was a planned meeting. We met at a fast food restaurant and no one else was there. He bought me bottled water. We talked about anything but his work. I didn’t want to seem too much like a fan. I didn’t want to be predictable. We talked about dating in your thirties, in your fifties, we talked about the sometimes loud sounds of protesting, about the rancid levels of nuts. I never asked for an autograph. I didn’t take a picture of him with my phone. I have no reminder, no souvenir that we ever met. It seemed too expected and too cheap. I didn’t want to be that person. I wasn’t that person.

7.  I visited New Orleans for the first time last year. I forgot my phone in the hotel room the day I arrived. I didn’t have a way to document, to remember ferns spilling off every balcony, the priest in the sunlight near an alley, black suits walking to an Archbishop’s funeral, a blinking casino that looked lost, the coal burning off the ferry to Algiers. I had to rely on seeing and remembering and trusting that I would remember everything right.

8.  Bright postcards swallow my refrigerator door. They’re slick in the way postcards are. They don’t necessarily mean I wish you were here. The one from Honolulu has one of the four statues of The Great King Kamehameha. His right arm is outstretched and brims with leis. Shadowed by kudzu, Savannah streets can’t compete. The Washington Memorial tries to be taller. Treasure Island at night doesn’t glitter enough. It’s the King I can’t escape when I get water, egg whites, salsa out of the refrigerator. It’s the way the sun is reflected on his forehead and his cheeks. It’s that he’s been remembered.

9. I donated the hibiscus charm to an object ethnography project. It’s been eight years since I chose the charm in that outdoor market with the vendors setting up around trees, growing up and out and into the shops. I remember all of it. I remember a woman in a chair reading palms there too. I remember wanting so badly to know what would happen to me.

Family and friends didn’t get it. They didn’t understand why a person would give a genuine gold charm away to a stranger. I didn’t want it anymore. But it’s real gold. I don’t need it anymore.

I remember without it.

10.  After ending my last relationship, I realized that I lost a pair of my favorite earrings, black flowers, to my ex-boyfriend. Lost isn’t accurate. Left. I’m always leaving some thing behind when I leave some one. I never want my things back. I’d rather they stay on without me in a space where I once moved. I imagine they’re my ghost, lingering, nudging old lovers and boyfriends. For all I know, my earrings were gently thrown into the trash on top of an empty cereal box or maybe placed in a generic, embossed metallic box with a cotton pillow and given to the next person he kissed.

11.  I had just landed at the airport and was waiting for my luggage when I heard the birds. I heard them before I saw them. I can’t tell you how many, what type, or even what their song sounded like, but stiff, white cardboard boxes punctuated the side of the baggage claim area. They were near a sign that read Lost and Found. That was the first thing I wanted to take a picture of in New Orleans—the holed boxes, the bird shadows inside, the smallish crowd trying to identify a feather, something specific to remember and hold onto.

12.  My camera phone reminds me that there are 37 pictures remaining. I never do anything with the pictures. Nevertheless, the phone is overwhelmed with Vegas, Montreal, Quebec City, D.C., Chicago, Honolulu, San Antonio, Cincinnati, New York, Coney Island, Savannah, Hilton Head, Los Angeles, Denver, Atlanta, Chattanooga, Albuquerque, Philadelphia. I’ll have to buy more memory or I’ll have to stop swimming in what’s happened. Look for land. Dry off. Look forward.

13.  I mail four postcards to the same four people every time I go away. I send one postcard to myself. I remind myself what not to forget—a loud flower, a stranger I met while waiting for the bus who later bandaged my cut foot, a solo birthday limo ride, a missed flight, how I got so lost.

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You can even base your own travels around Tintin’s.

People should start adventure clubs where they base their journeys around those of real or imagined adventurers. For starters: Graham Greene.

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Yesterday a woman bought a Russian phrase book.  I told her that I heard a Starbucks cappuccino costs fifteen U.S. dollars if you buy it in Red Square.

She said that she was just going to St. Petersburg where certainly coffee must be cheaper.

Another guy was planning on going to Greenland but acted almost too casual about this decision. I think he thought I was doubting his resolve which, honestly I was.

I did recommend a book about a father and son’s harried boat trip to the tip of Greenland, N by E by Moby Dick illustrator Rockwell Kent.

Many people buy the Costa Rica travel guide, especially families.  Someone else recommended Portugal with wringing hands — but then said, apropos of caffeine’s effect on the brain, that the worst, most barbaric traffic in the world exists in Cairo. If you live through a taxi ride in Cairo, you can survive anything.

I asked her if you could sail from Portugal to Morocco.  She didn’t know but said good luck finding out. I still haven’t found out — but will. You see, I have a fantasy that some day soon I might have enough money to travel again.

Which is really pretty funny considering the egregiously low amount of money I manage to live on.

Why is travel important? I’m not sure it is but for me, it might remind me that I’m still youthful, optimistic and capable of flagrant, fearless and beautiful gestures.  If this sounds precious, consider the people you know, even yourself, who are daily beset by crushing moments of powerlessness, fear and self-doubt. Certainly, taking some action to alleviate these traumas is good for all involved.

Lately I’ve been feeling the illusion of getting old which, in San Francisco, is even more illusory.  But beyond that I’m questioning whether humanity — in light of the headlines — was a good idea in the first place.  It must be time for a trip.

In an effort to inspire myself, I’m picking out travel books to read.

I don’t really like your straightforward travel book in which a seemingly bad-ass yet self-deprecating man or woman goes to some dangerous or far-flung third world place and survives snakes, car wrecks and diseases all while introducing the native population to American dance moves.

So I’ve picked out a few gems that I think won’t disappoint. In fact, it was the customers at my very store who introduced me to these books (none of which I’ve read yet.)  It’s no surprise that a couple of them have been republished by New York Review Book Classics.

The Way Of The World by Nicolas Bouvier: “In 1953, twenty-four-year old Nicolas Bouvier and his artist friend Thierry Vernet set out to make their way overland from their native Geneva to the Khyber Pass. They had a rattletrap Fiat and a little money, but above all they were equipped with the certainty that by hook or by crook they would reach their destination, and that there would be unanticipated adventures, curious companionship, and sudden illumination along the way.”

A Time Of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor: “At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains. Acclaimed for its sweep and intelligence, Leigh Fermor’s book explores a remarkable moment in time.”

No Hurry To Get Home by Emily Hahn: “Born in St. Louis in 1905, she crashed the all-male precincts of the University of Wisconsin geology department as an undergraduate, traveled alone to the Belgian Congo at age 25, was the concubine of a Chinese poet in Shanghai, bore the child of the head of the British Secret Service before World War II, and finally returned to New York to live and write in Greenwich Village.”

The Caliph’s House by Tahir Shah:  “Inspired by the Moroccan vacations of his childhood, Tahir Shah dreamed of making a home in that astonishing country. At age thirty-six he got his chance. Investing what money he and his wife, Rachana, had, Tahir packed up his growing family and bought Dar Khalifa, a crumbling ruin of a mansion by the sea in Casablanca that once belonged to the citys caliph, or spiritual leader.”

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There’s a lot to smile at in The Bigness of the World, Lori Ostlund’s Flannery O’Conner Award-winning collection—but there aren’t a lot of jokes. In fact, over the course of a dozen stories, Ostlund presents all kinds of suffering: death, self-mutilation, jail, child abuse, poverty, and an overabundance of breakups. As the title suggests, Bigness is full of characters confronted with the unmapped and unexpected, with newness and unthinkable difference; even as Ostlund’s characters wish for stillness, shit happens. As the narrator tells us at the end of the title story, “the familiar terrain of our childhood would soon become a vast, unmarked landscape.”

In depicting this unpredictable world, Ostlund is forced to leave behind the short story’s generic punch-line structure. While her stories often end with surprises, these endings, happily, never really seem to be the point. In one story, for instance, a character dies—but Ostlund ends not with some poetic meditation on the sadness of death, but with a table full of tourists, people who didn’t know him very well, who have a drink, make a few jokes, then change the subject. In two other stories, parents depart; the children, as they must, get on with being children. As Auden suggested in “Musée des Beaux Artes,” and The Bigness of the World repeats, in moments of suffering “someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” In Ostlund’s fictional worlds, there are always other people—with their own stories, their own plots and themes—who can’t be expected to understand or even care about the central character’s sadness.

But this openness to difference, to other characters and other lives, is not as easy as it seems. To be sure, for a collection concerned with otherness and newness, Bigness contains an improbable number of Minnesotan lesbians travelling overseas, or teaching, or teaching overseas. Ostlund, though, doesn’t pretend that we always give a shit about others—while is full of difference, this is not the celebrated difference of the harmonious postcolonial soup. Ostlund’s characters are generally repulsed by the cultures they face: A hotel room in Belize has “the smell of raw sewage,” because “the toilet stood shamelessly out in the open.” In Malaysia, a wounded man sits outside the couple’s hotel, “groaning day and night, no doubt from the pain caused by the gaping wound that ran from one of his nipples to his navel.” On a bus in Morocco, three young kids are made to lie beneath their parents seats; while two Minnesotan lesbian teachers watch, the children are soaked by vomit that flows from the front of the bus. Ostlund’s characters are disgusted with other bodies, as well as the abhorrent and uncivilized aspects of other cultures.

Lori Ostlund

In this way, Ostlund rubbishes all the usual clichés about the wonders of travel. In one story, set in Southeast Asia, a group of Americans drink only with other Americans, because, “The truth of it is, they are all tired of dealing with non-Americans, tired of having to explain themselves and of having to work so hard to understand what others are explaining to them.” In Morocco, two women are disappointed by the desert because it is exactly what they expected. In Belize, another pair visits a community of Mennonites, to find that they are not entirely welcome. In the Malaysia of “Bed Death,” the characters’ apartment building is used for suicide attempts.

As dark as all this seems, Ostlund also provides consistently quirky, deadpan stories. “And Down We Went,” a story of nostalgia, loneliness and breakups, opens with, “I have been defecated on three times in my life.” Another breakup story, “Upon Completion of Baldness,” begins, “My girlfriend returned from Hong Kong bald, thoroughly bald, the bumps and veins of her skull rising up in relief, as neat and stark as the stitching on a baseball.” Later in that story, we read of “Mr. Matthews, who had gone on to post several signs in the teachers’ lounge announcing that he was interested in acquiring used Tupperware, the word used underlined thrice.” In “Nobody Walks to the Mennonites,” we are given the story of “Sara and Sarah, who, because they were visual people, did not think of themselves as having the same name.”

This antimony of the quirky and the somber, which runs throughout the collection, is introduced in the title story. We find, on the one hand, the narrator’s very serious mother and father, a bank vice president and a “PR Czar.” On the other hand, we have the narrator’s babysitter, Ilsa, an imaginative, constantly crying, Chinese opera-imitating, toothbrush-borrowing lunatic. Crazy people, of course, are useful, because they help us perpetuate the myth that there is an us, a community, a common sense, into which they don’t fit. In Ostlund’s stories, though, the pervading theme is the failure of community, a failure to understand or empathize with the lives of others. Such failures are most interesting and most tragic not between cultures, but between lovers—Bigness is full of women who share beds but little else. Ostlund masters the sadness of breakups—not the melodrama, but the empty inevitability of doors closing between people. “For at each turn,” she writes, “the people we hold close elude us, living their other lives, the lives that we can never know.” Relationships, she suggests, are profoundly easy to fuck up.

Writing-wise, Ostlund never loses control. Characters, too, never engage in dramatic battles, or throw temper tantrums, or wax lyrical. Instead they wax analytic: They give reasons for their behavior, they interpret their lives. These stories are tragedies without tragic heroes. Whatever her characters feel, whatever passions are roiling beneath the surface, Ostlund expertly leaves alone. But beneath her theme of unintended offense, of unbridgeable difference, there is always the threat of disruption, unreason, the return of the repressed. It is this threat that gives these careful, precise stories their force.

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What makes Istanbul worth while to the outsider is not the presence of the mosques and the covered souks, but the fact that they still function as such.  If the people of India did not have their remarkable awareness of the importance of spiritual discipline, it would be an overwhelmingly depressing country to visit, notwithstanding its architectural wonders.

And North Africa without its tribes, inhabited by, let us say, the Swiss, would be merely a rather more barren California.”

-From The Preface to Their Heads Are Green And Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes From The Non-Christian World by Paul Bowles.

I’m just beginning this book now, but only yesterday I finished a much-delayed reading of his masterful novel The Sheltering Sky which is set in North Africa and revolves around the emotional and existential crises of an American couple in the late 1940′s as they struggle to make sense of and make peace with the arid, bright and disorienting world around them.

I can safely say that I will re-read The Sheltering Sky many more times because I can’t imagine how he managed to craft so many perfect sentences conveying so much tension, beauty and insight over the course of over three hundred pages. (Piece of advice: skip the movie and just read the book.)

Based on what I’ve read of him, I can’t think of another American writer who has so embraced and explored, in word and deed, the living concept of “The Other.” Especially “the Other” that we today, as Americans and Westerners and secular neo-liberal Judeo-Christian materialists are supposed to be so afraid of: “the Muslim Other.”

For Bowles, it was never enough just to be somewhere else. He insisted on adopting the languages, customs and habits of whatever cultural context he found himself in. Often the context was Muslim, albeit of an often more secular version, as was enjoyed in Tangier, Morocco when he lived there.

In fact he lived most of his life in Morocco, and then later in Ceylon. He enjoyed an open relationship with his wife Jane, in which each of them pursued liaisons with the same sex. He acted as a lightning rod for other would-be ex-pats like Burroughs, Corso and  Ginsberg who would find much to enjoy in Tangier, Morocco.

He traveled and lived in many sectors of the Muslim world and was an ardent champion of its culture, music and literature. A large part of his writing explores the frequently disastrous effects of Western influence in non-Western cultures and how these opposing cultures tend to reflect and distort each one’s prejudices in strange and unusual ways.

I’d be fascinated to know what Bowles would think of  our current world’s increasingly more generalized struggle between, I’m told, the Secular West and the Islamic East.

I’m eager to explore more of his writings for insights into this and can perhaps begin with this other sentence in the prelude to his book of travel essays: “My own belief is that the people of the alien cultures are being ravaged not so much by the by-products of our civilization, as by the irrational longing on the part of members of their own educated minorities to cease being themselves and become Westerners.”

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