Marcia DeSanctis - A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life

Praise for A Hard Place to Leave

These probing, achingly beautiful essays form an indelible portrait of a life. Who is this woman with her many, at times contradictory, facets? She is an adventurer, journalist, wife, mother, daughter, her world set spinning by the brilliance of her mind, the tenacity of her love for her family, and the intensity of her longing to be anywhere but here. Through the very act of interrogating her own restlessness, Marcia DeSanctis provides us with a tantalizing window into a rich and singular world.

Dani Shapiro, New York Times bestselling author of Inheritance

Marcia DeSanctiss A Hard Place to Leave is perfumed with lush, luminous language as she sweeps us all across the globe. From Moscow to Cape Town, quiet New England to Sweden, these tender portraits grow on us like a spring garden.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

Never has a travel memoir put the ordinary and the extraordinary in such tight and revelatory conversation. A Hard Place to Leave brims over with intelligence and human truth. More than just a recounting of a life boldly and peripatetically lived, its a reckoning with the passage of time, with ones own undying urges. I knew myself better by the end of this book, thanks to the fierce honesty and perpetual questing of Marcia DeSanctis.

Colleen Kinder, editor of Letter to a Stranger

There is such honesty and feeling on every page of Marcia DeSanctiss bookher avowal to push past the conventional boundaries of womens lives, her rediscovery of travel and solitude, her celebration of family, friendship, and homecomingthat I felt delightedly transported and deeply inspired.

Jasmin Darznik, New York Times bestselling author of The Bohemians

To read this masterfully composed memoir is to better understand our beautiful, broken world, our complex tethers to home and family, and our own imperfect selves. DeSanctis is brilliantly attuned to the nuances of these subjects, and she navigates the hairpin turns between the three with breathtaking curiosity, elegance, wisdom, and generosity. The essays in A Hard Place to Leave are equal parts dark and luminous, ferocious and tender, universal and intimateand the writing is some of the finest Ive ever read in my whole damn life.

Lavinia Spalding, author of Writing Away and editor of The Best Womens Travel Writing

Mountain climbing. Love affairs. Diplomats who may be spies, or love affairs, or both. Marcia DeSanctiss travel essays are thoughtful, stylish, and loaded with charm. Its the kind of book that goes great with a glass of wine and a strong dose of wanderlust.

Rosecrans Baldwin, author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles

A Selection of Travelers Tales Books

Travel Literature

The Best Travel Writing, Soul of a Great Traveler, Deer Hunting in Paris, Fire Never Dies, Ghost Dance in Berlin, Guidebook Experiment, Kin to the Wind, Kite Strings of the Southern Cross, Last Trout in Venice, Marco Polo Didnt Go There, Rivers Ran East, Royal Road to Romance, A Sense of Place, Shopping for Buddhas, Soul of Place, Storm, Sword of Heaven, Take Me With You, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, Way of Wanderlust, Wings, Coast to Coast, Mother Tongue, Baboons for Lunch, Strange Tales of World Travel, The Girl Who Said No, French Like Moi, End of the World Notwithstanding, The Temporary European

Womens Travel

100 Places Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in Greece Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in the USA Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in Cuba Every Woman Should Go, 50 Places in Rome, Florence, & Venice Every Woman Should Go, Best Womens Travel Writing, Gutsy Women, Mothers World, Safety and Security for Women Who Travel, Wild with Child, Womans Asia, Womans Europe, Womans Path, Womans World, Womans World Again, Women in the Wild

Body & Soul

Food, How to Eat Around the World, A Mile in Her Boots, Pilgrimage, Road Within

Country and Regional Guides

30 Days in Italy, 30 Days in the South Pacific, America, Antarctica, Australia, Brazil, Central America, China, Cuba, France, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, Spain, Thailand, Tibet, Turkey; Alaska, American Southwest, Grand Canyon, Hawaii, Hong Kong, Middle East, Paris, Prague, Provence, San Francisco, South Pacific, Tuscany

Special Interest

Danger!, Gift of Birds, Gift of Rivers, Gift of Travel, How to Shit Around the World, Hyenas Laughed at Me, Leave the Lipstick, Take the Iguana, More Sand in My Bra, Mousejunkies!, Not So Funny When It Happened, Sand in My Bra, Testosterone Planet, Theres No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled, Thong Also Rises, What Color Is Your Jockstrap?, Wake Up and Smell the Shit, The World Is a Kitchen, Writing Away, China Option, La Dolce Vita University

Copyright 2022 Marcia DeSanctis. All rights reserved.

Travelers Tales and Solas House are trademarks of Solas House, Inc., Palo Alto, California

travelerstales.com | solashouse.com

Art Direction and Cover Design: Kimberly Nelson

Interior Design and Page Layout: Howie Severson

Cover Photograph: Miti (@mitifotos)

Author Photograph: Elena Seibert Photography

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

978-1-60952-206-3 (paperback)

978-1-60952-207-0 (ebook)

978-1-60952-208-7 (hard cover)

First Edition

Printed in the United States

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is in memory of my mother,
Ruth Ann DeSanctis

One ghost in search of several others, I trotted dreamily about, proving to myself that things were in order: the corners must be sharp and clear, the lines incisive for my future contemplation.

M.F.K. Fisher

Some part of me is always left hanging on the places I travel throughnew countries, clear or cloudy skies, oceans in the pearly gray rainits left clinging so passionately that I feel as if Im leaving behind me a thousand little ghosts that look like me, rolling in the waves, rocking on the leaves, scattered in the clouds

Colette

Table of Contents

Introduction

A bandon. This is the word we carry when we arrive somewhere else. To give ourselves over without restraint. It is a singular thrill, to pitch out of the satisfying but predictable order of domestic life into this state of disarray. We become vagabonds, searchers, giddy tourists. Whatever the case, we are, above all, strangers. So in that sense, we assume a second meaning: to desert, as in our own selves. We know who we are in our homes. We have no idea who well be in Kigali, Racine, or Angkor Wat.

The voyage usually starts with the same script. How strange and wonderful it is to stash only the essentials into a bag and shut the door behind us. We lift off. We land somewhere across the world, usually alone, usually in the middle of the night. Hunched by fatigue and the weight of our luggage, we find our room, switch on the lights. Sometimes its decent.

What, exactly, has been left behind? And what might lead us back home? Every arrival is a crash course in possibility, but it does not always open a path to immaculate wide-eyed clarity. Waiting for a bus under a battering sun or breathing the bug spray on a hotel pillow, we crave the safety of our old couch, the comfort and camaraderie of friends and family. But comfort never endures. Restlessness prickles under the skin. Whatever the story becomes, one cannot write about travel without writing about home. Each leads to the other and back again.