Try to Get Lost
Finalist for the 2020 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction
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’s 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.
These essays soar when the writer as thinker and the writer as traveler—in the sense of a person moving deliberately through the world—most wholly converge.
More than once [Joan Frank] refers to Shirley Hazzard, and I felt, reading Frank, what I feel reading Hazzard, an inclination not to turn the pages to see what happens next but to dwell on the page, to linger in the evocation of scents, vistas, and emotions. Her observations are precise, witty, charming even at their crankiest.…Joan Frank is a vastly compelling and lyrical guide.
A unique, entertaining, thoughtful, and thought-provoking blend of essay-formatted travelogue and observational commentaries, Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place is an extraordinary and highly recommended addition to both community and academic library collections.
Whether sparkling with enthusiasm or turning downright curmudgeonly, the essays of Try to Get Lost record the ups and downs of travel with wit, insight, and unfailing honesty.
Try to Get Lost is superb travel literature. It might also be one of the best memoirs you’ll read this year.
Her smart, surprising, irreverent travel essays will give you wanderlust.
Frank’s rich, imagery-driven prose lends immediacy to her observations. This is a perfect book for readers to take on their travels, even if they’re only going as far as the armchair.
Philosophical, sophisticated literary forays that are a pleasure to dwell in.
Wry and emotionally powerful.
Try to Get Lost is a bold, engaging disquisition on the perils and promises of travel: both cranky and wise, worldly and cultivated, humorous and rueful, its every sentence sparkles. All in all, it is thoroughly entertaining, a sophisticated pleasure.
Joan Frank animates her loving and irreverent essays with a vital, unspoken question: How do the human tendencies to idealize, project, rank, divide, and dismiss get in the way of reading the world with accuracy, with complexity? Try to Get Lost is an ongoing act of awe that gives itself permission to roll its eyes now and then. It’s necessary. It’s brilliant.
Filled with wit, soul, and insight, each of the essays in this radiant collection offers not only a layered and revelatory portrait of the places that enchant and haunt Frank—from Paris to Florence to her hometown of Phoenix with its many ghosts—but also a profound meditation on the possibility of discovery, the inevitability of loss, and the power of both to unmake and remake us.
Joan Frank is the award-winning author of a number of books of literary fiction and essays including Because You Have To: A Writing Life and All the News I Need: A Novel. She lives with her husband, playwright Bob Duxbury, in the North Bay Area of California.
Prologue: The Where of It
Shake Me Up, Judy
Cake-Frosting Country
Cake-Frosting Coda: The Astonishment Index
In Case of Firenze
A Bag of One’s Own
Cave of the Iron Door
Red State, Blue State: A Short, Biased Lament
Today I Will Fly
Little Traffic Light Men
Place as Answer: HGTV
Rules for the Well-Intended
Think of England
Location Sluts
The Room Where It Happens
Lundi Matin
Coda: I See a Long Journey
Acknowledgments
