Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place

River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize

by Joan Frank

Through the author's travels in Europe and the United States, Try to Get Lost explores the quest for place that compels and defines us: the things we carry, how politics infuse geography, media depictions of an idea of home, the ancient and modern reverberations of the word "hotel," and the ceaseless discovery generated by encounters with self and others on familiar and foreign ground. Frank posits that in fact time itself may be our ultimate, inhabited place: "the vastest real estate we know," with a "stunningly short" lease.

Genres: Travel, Essays, Memoir, Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2020

Reviews

[Courtney Schomaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

These essays were thought provoking and a really interesting take on place, home, travel, desire, and time - I appreciated the ideas and the style of writing, but I couldn’t shake the sense that I was reading a book of essays about travel written by someone who doesn’t actually like to travel. Not anymore, at least. I liked the glimpses of “why we travel”, but they were bogged down by the author’s seemingly random and very pessimistic descriptions of her own travels (the broken down apartment in Florence, the depression of every hotel worker/wait staff she ever encountered, how difficult and energy consuming it is to travel, how much she dreads each trip, etc etc). And maybe that’s the point. Traveling is hard, so why do we do it? I just think she overshot the “traveling is hard” part without really fully addressing the “why do we do it” aspect. I did love her take on the idea of home and the all-consuming nature of desire though, so there were some gems!

[David Allen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The subway cover pulled me in, as did the title, which seemed to promise that the author would urge us to ramble and explore. Instead, these essays were almost anti-travel, if they were about travel at all, and they tended toward gloom. Somewhat enjoyable regardless, but the overall impression is sourness.

[Ron Nyren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Try to Get Lost. Joan Frank captures qualities of travel and place that I haven’t seen named anywhere else: the eternal hopefulness and optimism of the traveler, the weariness that accrues with experience over many journeys, and the petty annoyances, disorientations, and alternate logics at work in places that are foreign to us. And yet still she retains a sense of the wonder and romance underneath and above and even inside the difficult experiences. She illuminates the ways the past overlays the present and vice versa, like the “old fashioned photo negative’s transparency over a color image” she mentions in the essay “Cave of the Iron Door.” We can and can’t travel away from who we are and from our pasts and past selves.

The voice of the essays is addictive, with its musing, sensitive sensibility and attention to nuance and detail. Of the many, many, many sentences that I found exhilarating with insight: “Something is at once noble and wretched about the burden and gift of property: exalting and damning, Pearl Buck and Scarlett O’Hara, scrabbling for potatoes in the stubborn dirt and shaking one’s fist at the sky one moment, the next beaming in contentment, to an Aaron Copland soundtrack, as lord of all one surveys.” Here as everywhere, Frank sees and names multiple ways of looking at the world and experience and place and lets them hang suspended together.

And she writes beautifully about grief and loss, somehow managing to be moving and evocative and sad and beautiful and brimming with feeling while never feeling insistent or intrusive on the reader—just naming and naming and naming again the way loss takes us and the ways we find to carry onward.

[Jeanne Julian · Rating 4 out of 5]

These essays are not a travelogue, a cheery celebration of adventuring abroad. Rather, Try to Get Lost, winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, assesses the effects of “travel and place” upon the psyche. Despite her prickliness, her view that travel entails suffering, Frank can become pleasurably dreamy-eyed in Europe, especially in France. Her study of place also includes the United States. She devotes chapters to the political and cultural divides between Red and Blue states, to the HGTV phenomenon, and to “Rules for the Well-Intended” American traveler abroad. In the chapter “In the Cave of the Iron Door,” anguished memories arise during a return to her childhood home in the Arizona desert. I loved the chapter “Shake Me Up, Judy” that begins, “The first thing I do these days, when planning travel, is to not want to go.” Her honesty is refreshing: who has not lain awake before a pre-dawn flight, even to an envisioned paradise, and thought, “Why am I doing this?” Only much later, in calm reflection, do we understand the impact a journey, a place, has had on us. This collection can serve as a model for such reflection, the rewards of being “simply a human noticing,” a practice at which Frank is adept.

[Mia · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is so much to like in this series of essays about the trials of travel. I have never rented an apartment in Italy but I was once accused by a hotelier of stealing light bulbs when I discovered there was not a single light bulb in any lamp in my room. He was so upset about replacing the bulbs that I am convinced that he either took them himself or had the maids steal them for him and someone got over conscientious about the number. And I also have obsessed for years about finding the perfect carry on bag. Having visited Phoenix many times, I rarely meet a native and it is interesting to learn about how the environment shaped her life and the life of her mother. When she wades into deeper philosophical waters, I am not always on the same wave length. She is happy to visit countries with ancient buildings and ruins and think about the lives lived within those walls but the process of realizing that we will all be part of the past takes a long time for her. This was a great book to start my year of reading.

[Debi Coish · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first chapter is - finally - the best descriptor of my own experiences of travel ever! (And I can add to it) Such Glee when someone nails it!

Loved the explanation of the British, hailing from, it explains much.

But - the last four pages - I have been there. Lifted up the veil. That's why I backed away from suicide, figured I'd somehow signed up for this tour of duty, and would see it out.

[Nan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joan Frank's essays reflect on traveling to places as well as traveling back to where she came. Keenly aware of the sights, sounds, and emotions that chart our connections to a geographical location, Frank's writing, intentionally or not, pushes readers to reflect on their own experiences of origin and travel.

[Cristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I dare anyone to read anything by Joan Frank and not think she is one of the best writers of our time. Her short stories on travel grab you. Her writing is smart and witty. I cant believe I am just discovering right now...

[Bob Wake · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review is online at www.coffeespew.org.

[Suzanne Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. These place-based essays are smart, sassy, and irreverent.

[Margaret · Rating 1 out of 5]

This reads like the stream-of-consciousness diary of a rather grumpy traveler who needed a good editor.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok book… wasn’t exactly what I expected.