Murray - Open mic night in Moscow: and other stories from my search for black markets, Soviet architecture, and emotionally unavailable Russian men

Hello, Im Audrey. Welcome to my book.

Ive never written a book before, but in researching this one, I opened dozens of them, and I noticed that many start off with the same mistake. The first page contains a few quotations that obviously mean something to the author but are presented without context or explanation. As a result, they fall flat, sound pretentious, or make you wonder, Why is a cookbook leading with an excerpt from Machiavelli?

To avoid falling into this trap, Im going to explain the significance of the quotes from my epigraph.

The first comes from the 2014 Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia, which I obtained by illegally downloading it from a Russian website and used it extensively while planning portions of my trip, and later while crafting the copyright page of this book. I found the copyright page to be one of the most daunting to write. How do you strike the right balance between keeping it light but also sounding legally threatening? What makes a good ISBN? Is it gauche to list your parents home address? The Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia helped me navigate not only the Pamir Mountains and a fire crater in the desert of Turkmenistan, but also the supple ins and outs of a well-honed Library of Congress catalog entry.

The second quotation is more meaningful to me. It comes from a TripAdvisor users review of Red Square in Moscow, and because its in Russian, I dont understand what it means. But it speaks to me just the same, in the way that poetic truths transcend language, time, and copyright laws. (Update: I just ran the quote through Google Translate, and it turns out that it means, Nothing special. So, tick the box. Everything is very pompous, uncomfortable, formal. A gloomy place. So yeah, confirmedimmortal words.)

The final quote comes from my roadmap to life and favorite book of all time, Why Men Love Bitches. If youve never read it, go return my book and use the store credit to buy a copy. Why Men Love Bitches lays out a life philosophy that its predecessors (the Torah, Bible, and Koran) were grasping for, but never managed to reach. That philosophy is basically: do what makes you happy, dont worry about what other people think, and when it comes to dating, play a little hard to get. Im including an excerpt from the acknowledgments section as a reminder that I need to file my taxes.

Now that the quotes are out of the way, heres a quick overview of the book so you know what to expect, and also have something to say if you find yourself in a situation where you need to pretend to have read it (e.g., core curriculum of the near future, a literary salon). Truly, I understand: if I could have, I would have pretended to have written it. My plan had been to just pull an all-nighter and bang it all out the day before publication, but it turns out that publishing a book is a little different from writing a high school essay.

Basically, its about this twenty-eight-year-old woman (aka me) who decides to spend a year traveling through the former Soviet Union (aka the best place ever) because shes insanely obsessed with the Russian language and culture (aka all of her boyfriends were Russian), and along the way she learns a lot and and meets a bunch of people and winds up in situations that are awkward and funny and occasionally poignant (aka give her the Pulitzer Prize?).

Its hard to say how my fascination with all things Russian began. Was it my first Russian boyfriend (Oleg)? My second Russian boyfriend (Anton)? My third Russian boyfriend (back to Oleg again)?

It happened in bits and pieces, without my particularly noticing, but by the time I turned twenty-eight, Id become so obsessed with the countries that gave us beets, Dostoevsky, and websites for streaming pirated movies that it seemed perfectly logical to spend a year traveling through the former Soviet Union and trying to learn Russian.

This was not something Id seen coming.

Before I turned twenty, Id been outside of the United States exactly once, when I was six months old and my parents took me to England. I have no memory of this trip, but it did leave me with an infant passport that I used for years as a backup form of identification. Bouncers everywhere were mystified.

In college I spent a semester in Paris and came back feeling very worldly. I started eating dinner at eight p.m. and annoying every French person I encountered by responding in my high-school-level French to their perfect, unaccented English. Then I met Oleg, and through him, Russian.

After I graduated from college, I took a real job, then quit and moved to China. In Shanghai, I did comedy, wrote plays, paid my rent and funded my habit of getting my bicycle stolen by SAT tutoring, and had the honor of being a free hotlines most frequent caller of the year. I met Anton, and through him came more Russian.

But unless shes lucky or raised in a matriarchal society, there comes a time in every young womans life when she faces increasing pressure to cool it and settle down. While the world has gotten better at allowing young women to explore their passions, there is still an unspoken (and sometimes spoken, repeated, and followed up in e-mails) expectation that she will put them aside in order to find love. Back in America, my friends were starting to get engaged and my parents wanted me to move home and do the same more than I wanted anything in particular for myself. And so after almost four years in China, I moved back to the U.S. and set out to settle down.

The only obstacles to my plan were the fact that I wasnt really sure what settling down entailed, that I was unsure how you were supposed to do it, and that I knew that I definitely didnt want to.

But I was certain I could make it work. If I could make a life for myself on another continent and be a distinguished guest at a free hotlines annual gala, where if Im being honest things got a little awkward when the operators came out and performed skits making fun of the people who called in but we got over that, I could work out how to become the type of person who drove a minivan.

In the dreamy and aspirational sense, I wanted to travel through the former Soviet Union. But it was a pipe dream. Not something I ever expected to achieve in this lifetime. Or at least, not something I thought would be financially feasible before the age of 70, unless my Beanie Baby collection shot up in value.

What I hadnt realized was that sometimes an incredible stroke of luck takes a form other than a stuffed animal with a tag protector.

A few months after Id arrived in New York, a former boss in Shanghai asked if Id like to come back and SAT tutor for the busy seasons. Id return to Shanghai for one- or two-month stretches, work truly horrendous hours but make bank, and then go back to New York for a few months.

Or, I thought, instead of going back to New York, I could go to Russia.

This was my version of winning the Hamilton lottery, or maybe even the actual lottery.

But as soon as the thought popped into my head, I banished it. I still didnt know what settling down looked like. But I was pretty sure it did not involve yurts.