Travel Memoirs To Read and Write

 

        TRAVEL

This morning, I read a guest post on the Memoir Writers Journey blog. The post was written by Carole Bumpus, the author of a travel memoir. The book cover is below and the article can be read here. 

In her post, Ms. Bumpus relates the importance of family traditions and stories along with the food of the region. A perfect travel memoir.

Travel memoirs are of interest to readers who cannot travel but also to those who do. The first group gets to 'see' a country and its people through the eyes of the memoir writer, and the second group has the joy of reliving places they've enjoyed. 

One of the nice parts of a travel/food memoir is that the author is not dealing with a tragedy in his/her life as so many memoirs do. Not that there is anything wrong with that type of memoir. It's a different approach, and we all do like a variety in whatever we do and wherever we go. 

I was particularly interested in the way Ms. Bumpus used the family stories I so often urge people to write as a complement to the foods of the region and her traveling. You may notice that the book she is writing about is Book 2. I searched for her name at Amazon and found not only Book 1 but also a novel and a recipe book to accompany the novel. 

If you have any interest in writing a travel memoir with a theme, I would suggest reading as many as you can find. My book club once read A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle. It's a most entertaining book in which he shares one full year of life for his wife and himself in a 200-year-old stone house along with the local color and foods, joys and mishaps, and more. Do a search with the keywords 'travel memoir' and see what others you can find. 

A travel memoir is not a report of a trip with a day by day description of where you are, what you saw, what you ate. That works fine in your own travel journal. A person who writes a travel memoir must also be a good storyteller, and he/she must give the reader something to take away. You must share what you learned with the reader. You want to take your reader on both a real journey and an emotional one. You're not writing a guidebook. 

Have any of you written a travel memoir? Please tell us about it in the comments section below.