Where Have All The Cowgirls Gone?

Wednesday is about books. And/or writing. Today, it’s about travel writing. Some favourites. And a request for you to share your favourites in the genre. And where is the non-male representation?

I don’t make it my business to read travel-writing – but when I do, I’m often pleased. There are, as with any genre, some shining examples. The best travel-writing is, like the best music and entertainment writing, the best sport writing, the best any kind of journalism, simply a case of reading good writing. And I love reading good writing.

So, I mean, I guess I think instantly of Bill Bryson – as the guy from the 1990s that pumped out a bunch of books, and was so readable, and funny, and fairly wise too, that he ended up writing books on almost every subject. The first Bryson I ever read actually was his Mother Tongue, still one of my favourite books about the English language. I read his dictionary of Troublesome Words too before I started ripping through the Walk In The Woods, and Notes From A Small Island and Neither Here nor There, Down Under, and the African Diary. I stayed on for his book about Shakespeare and a couple of the ones about science – but I’m no completist. Those books are probably still fun to discover now, but they felt very of their time. An airport read you could trust.

The travel writer I really loved was P.J. O’Rourke. In fact, I loved all of his writing. (R.I.P.) He's one of the great examples of someone I couldn’t be further ideologically opposed to – but I just loved the fun he had with sentences. He was a great writer. And I first met him as a kind of travel writer; his books Holidays In Hell and Holidays in Heck are among my favourites. His political writing (Parliament of Whores), his motorsports writing (Driving Like Crazy), his comedy writing (The Bachelor Home Companion) – I loved all of it. And my all-time favourite book of his was the memoir/sampler, Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut. But he had a bit of a spin on the travel writing cliché – that was one of his core strengths as a writer. And he was entertaining as hell.

One of the classics of travel-writing that I adored was Travels With Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck. As with the Bryson and O’Rourke, I discovered it as I was discovering Steinbeck, it was just part of the catalogue, almost irrelevant that it was travel-writing. But I certainly loved that book. The same is true though for On The Road by Kerouac (which might count as travel writing) and some of the essays and prose-poems by Henry Rollins – a kind of travel-writing.

I’m not a huge On The Road fan though. But I’ve tried. I’ve read it more than once. And I do like some Kerouac. But Rollins is a great travel-writer I reckon. He is cautious to call himself a journalist, he’s a punk singer; that’s his credential. The rest (acting, speaking, writing, DJing, publishing), is all that has come after, he’s poked his nose into the corners to have a go. And though it doesn’t always work, doesn’t always stick, I reckon he writes (and/or speaks) a travel story with not only great gusto but the right amount of humour, pathos, observation and empathy.

I know a few of the classic names of travel-writing like Paul Theroux (aka Louis’ dad). And Pico Iyer. I know them from anthologies, rather than having read whole tomes. And then there are the writers with a journalistic background that were able to spin an interesting line (Norman Mailer, Graham Greene, George Orwell). Some of them offering expert reports, others just dipping a toe in the water and finding they can swim.

But hey, look at this list of the greats in travel-writing.

Only three female names – and we might need to strike one of those since she’s the author of Eat Pray Love, and I can’t abide that whatsoever.

So that leads me to my question: Who are the great female or non-binary travel-writers? This sort of writing feels like it started with and comes from the ultimate privilege. Not only the time (and money) to travel, but to be paid to do it, and to share your thoughts. So, I can see how it was always a male-dominated field. But there must be non-males out there with things to say about their experience. That’s the travel-writing I’m far more interested in now. And I’d love to know some names to add to my list.

What’s the best travel-writing you’ve read? Any favourite accounts or single volumes? Or any must-read authors you can recommend?