Margo Christie's Blog - Posts Tagged "travel"
The Power of Running Away - A review of Cara Lopez Lee's memoir "They Only Eat Their Husbands"
I met Cara Lopez Lee at a writing workshop she conducted at the Denver Woman’s Press Club in the fall of 2014. She’d recently released her memoir “They Only Eat Their Husbands,” and was using a few excerpts from the book as jumping-off points to get participants writing about their own travel-related growth experiences. The workshop was excellent. Lopez Lee has a style that’s confident, approachable and relatable. Her exercises were easy to get into, and they provided the inspiration I was looking for in styling my own writing workshop.
I’m not much of a memoir reader. Perhaps this is why I feel “They Only Eat Their Husbands” is about 50 to 100 pages too long. Lopez Lee is excellent at no-holds-barred observational writing, the sort of which is especially noteworthy when applied to one’s own life, but I feel the book lacked unity. In short, not all of the numerous travel-related growth experiences she describes so well warrant inclusion in a work subtitled “Love, Travel and the Power of Running Away.” The book is alternately about love or travel, but rarely is it about the effect on the narrator of the two combined. If there’s anything that could be left out, it’s the initial scenes – I feel it’s safe to call them set-up scenes – in which she describes her upbringing with a narcissistic father and irresponsible mother, her subsequent passing-around from relative to relative, and other events that led her to embark upon a year-long globe-trot from her home in Alaska, where she worked as a TV reporter. Though Lopez Lee is from Los Angeles, she lived in Alaska - the scenes there did not speak to me of running away or travel. Of course, there was the search for love there, the longing for it with the wrong men, Chance and Sean; but Lopez Lee revisits these experiences by way of flashbacks throughout the narrative anyway. As well, her relationships with her much younger step-mother and step-sister might’ve been left out too. Though I acknowledge the value of these relationships in knowing the real Cara Lopez Lee, it is the author’s relationship to Chance and Sean and her discoveries about herself by way of this that is the make-or-break in this reader’s understanding of why she had to “run away.”
On the love theme, the episodes with Chance and Sean were infuriating. With Chance, I wanted to scream, “Can’t you see this guy’s an A-hole?!” The scenes with Sean warranted a bit more sympathy – In Cara’s “just friends” scenes with him, he is sweet and admirable. When he graduated to “hook-up” then later to boyfriend, the interaction between them became annoyingly toxic; its participants loathsome in their addiction to it. There were times when I wanted to jump through the pages and put a good choke-hold on one or both of them! Perhaps this is because I’m addictive and co-dependent; that essentially I’ve been there, done that. More to the point though, it speaks volumes about Lopez Lee’s ability to make the characters in her real-life drama compelling. If Sean and Cara weren’t so skin-crawlingly co-dependent in these scenes, they would not have elicited such a violent response from me.
Like the subtitle, the title itself seems out-of-whack with the themes. Though it refers to the narrator’s encounter with a praying mantis in Thailand and her humorous curiosity about whether or not the insect would harm her – “They only eat their husbands,” a neighbor informs – there isn’t much in the story that suggests predatory husband-eating. Rather, it would be more accurate to infer that women looking for love among alcoholics will likely fall prey to their manipulations; or that women travelling alone in male-dominated cultures might occasionally find themselves caught in an opportunist’s web. Not that I admonish Lopez Lee for going wherever and doing whatever she wants. On the contrary, I’ve travelled alone and know first-hand that getting hit-on by male chauvinists who assume alone equals desperate is but a minor irritation compared with the foot-loose, fancy-freedom of travelling solo. One of my favorite scenes is of the narrator being lured into “drinking coffee with the family” of an elderly male villager in the idyllic town of Xania, Crete. As it turns out, there is no family in this sleazy former politician’s snare; and it's soon apparent why: His trickiness is enough to drive away even the most patient and doting of old world wives!
Another favorite sequence has to do with a Spanish man of similar seniority to the Cretan trickster. After a few days of gallivanting around with him, Lopez Lee is confronted with the fact that this man is married and that their chumminess seems inappropriate in this small Spanish town. Here, I am reminded of how American the narrator is. Throughout the book, she’s more drawn to male companionship than female; and one of her remarkable “breakthroughs” seems to occur earlier, in Nepal, when she buddies up to some fellow female “trekkers” and acknowledges feeling encouraged as a result. An American woman and a loner besides, I myself have often felt more at-ease with male friends than female. Still, the co-dependent in me is well aware of the obvious benefits; i.e., the ability to flirt and manipulate, in such a tendency. Still, I couldn’t help but feel for Lopez Lee when a well-intentioned woman accuses her of indecent behavior with the gentlemanly Eduardo of Cuenca, Spain, who seems to want nothing from Cara but to share with her the beauty of his ever-changing-and-not-for-the-better hometown.
Ironically, it is in Dingle, Ireland that Lopez-Lee first acknowledges awareness of her Americanness. In a café, where musicians of English, Scottish and American heritage play folk music that is rooted in the blues, she informs the reader that this is her music, her American heritage. This was another favorite of mine. Pride in Americanness seems more appropriate to Nashville or Chicago than Ireland and I was proud of Lopez Lee for having this revelation in a less than expected place.
Unfortunately, all of the above are, for me, travel experiences that don’t necessarily correlate with Lopez’s love travails. They are eye-openers though- If nothing else, travel expands one's mind. A re-reading with my own mind open to prospective better titles might yield one more appropriate for this memoir. As for the sub-title, I've already landed on a superb one: Eliminate "Love" and "Travel" and simply call it “The Power of Running Away.”
I’m not much of a memoir reader. Perhaps this is why I feel “They Only Eat Their Husbands” is about 50 to 100 pages too long. Lopez Lee is excellent at no-holds-barred observational writing, the sort of which is especially noteworthy when applied to one’s own life, but I feel the book lacked unity. In short, not all of the numerous travel-related growth experiences she describes so well warrant inclusion in a work subtitled “Love, Travel and the Power of Running Away.” The book is alternately about love or travel, but rarely is it about the effect on the narrator of the two combined. If there’s anything that could be left out, it’s the initial scenes – I feel it’s safe to call them set-up scenes – in which she describes her upbringing with a narcissistic father and irresponsible mother, her subsequent passing-around from relative to relative, and other events that led her to embark upon a year-long globe-trot from her home in Alaska, where she worked as a TV reporter. Though Lopez Lee is from Los Angeles, she lived in Alaska - the scenes there did not speak to me of running away or travel. Of course, there was the search for love there, the longing for it with the wrong men, Chance and Sean; but Lopez Lee revisits these experiences by way of flashbacks throughout the narrative anyway. As well, her relationships with her much younger step-mother and step-sister might’ve been left out too. Though I acknowledge the value of these relationships in knowing the real Cara Lopez Lee, it is the author’s relationship to Chance and Sean and her discoveries about herself by way of this that is the make-or-break in this reader’s understanding of why she had to “run away.”
On the love theme, the episodes with Chance and Sean were infuriating. With Chance, I wanted to scream, “Can’t you see this guy’s an A-hole?!” The scenes with Sean warranted a bit more sympathy – In Cara’s “just friends” scenes with him, he is sweet and admirable. When he graduated to “hook-up” then later to boyfriend, the interaction between them became annoyingly toxic; its participants loathsome in their addiction to it. There were times when I wanted to jump through the pages and put a good choke-hold on one or both of them! Perhaps this is because I’m addictive and co-dependent; that essentially I’ve been there, done that. More to the point though, it speaks volumes about Lopez Lee’s ability to make the characters in her real-life drama compelling. If Sean and Cara weren’t so skin-crawlingly co-dependent in these scenes, they would not have elicited such a violent response from me.
Like the subtitle, the title itself seems out-of-whack with the themes. Though it refers to the narrator’s encounter with a praying mantis in Thailand and her humorous curiosity about whether or not the insect would harm her – “They only eat their husbands,” a neighbor informs – there isn’t much in the story that suggests predatory husband-eating. Rather, it would be more accurate to infer that women looking for love among alcoholics will likely fall prey to their manipulations; or that women travelling alone in male-dominated cultures might occasionally find themselves caught in an opportunist’s web. Not that I admonish Lopez Lee for going wherever and doing whatever she wants. On the contrary, I’ve travelled alone and know first-hand that getting hit-on by male chauvinists who assume alone equals desperate is but a minor irritation compared with the foot-loose, fancy-freedom of travelling solo. One of my favorite scenes is of the narrator being lured into “drinking coffee with the family” of an elderly male villager in the idyllic town of Xania, Crete. As it turns out, there is no family in this sleazy former politician’s snare; and it's soon apparent why: His trickiness is enough to drive away even the most patient and doting of old world wives!
Another favorite sequence has to do with a Spanish man of similar seniority to the Cretan trickster. After a few days of gallivanting around with him, Lopez Lee is confronted with the fact that this man is married and that their chumminess seems inappropriate in this small Spanish town. Here, I am reminded of how American the narrator is. Throughout the book, she’s more drawn to male companionship than female; and one of her remarkable “breakthroughs” seems to occur earlier, in Nepal, when she buddies up to some fellow female “trekkers” and acknowledges feeling encouraged as a result. An American woman and a loner besides, I myself have often felt more at-ease with male friends than female. Still, the co-dependent in me is well aware of the obvious benefits; i.e., the ability to flirt and manipulate, in such a tendency. Still, I couldn’t help but feel for Lopez Lee when a well-intentioned woman accuses her of indecent behavior with the gentlemanly Eduardo of Cuenca, Spain, who seems to want nothing from Cara but to share with her the beauty of his ever-changing-and-not-for-the-better hometown.
Ironically, it is in Dingle, Ireland that Lopez-Lee first acknowledges awareness of her Americanness. In a café, where musicians of English, Scottish and American heritage play folk music that is rooted in the blues, she informs the reader that this is her music, her American heritage. This was another favorite of mine. Pride in Americanness seems more appropriate to Nashville or Chicago than Ireland and I was proud of Lopez Lee for having this revelation in a less than expected place.
Unfortunately, all of the above are, for me, travel experiences that don’t necessarily correlate with Lopez’s love travails. They are eye-openers though- If nothing else, travel expands one's mind. A re-reading with my own mind open to prospective better titles might yield one more appropriate for this memoir. As for the sub-title, I've already landed on a superb one: Eliminate "Love" and "Travel" and simply call it “The Power of Running Away.”
