Not Now, Voyager: A Memoir

Description

Since Marco Polo's explorations and Montaigne's travels, a lively dialogue has persisted about travel's pros and cons -- its excitement, novelties, perils, and misadventures. Lynne Sharon Schwartz joins this dialogue with a memoir that raises serious and amusing questions. Not Now, Voyager takes us on a voyage of self-discovery as the author traces how travel shaped her. She visits Miami Beach as an adolescent with an aunt and uncle and confronts the sensation of not belonging; she goes to Rome as a young woman and ponders the difference between ignorance and innocence; she ventures to Jamaica and witnesses acute political and social unrest; and she takes a family road trip to Montreal and watches her daughters come to their own startling realizations. In this memoir, Schwartz's history takes on new shapes, and her feelings about travel change as she does. Her story exemplifies a mode of travel: the mind on a journey, pausing, sometimes by design, sometimes by serendipity, lingering, backtracking, but always on the move.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is a celebrated author of novels, poems, short fiction, translations from Italian, and criticism. Her short fiction has appeared in the Best American Short Stories annual anthology series several times. The author of The Writing on the Wall, Disturbances in the Field, Referred Pain, Not Now, Voyager, and Two-Part Inventions, Schwartz lives in New York City and is currently a faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars.

"Schwartz is an elegant writer with a nimble intellect, with an incisive awareness of how human encounters shape journeys more than sightseeing itineraries do." --The Seattle Times "As Schwartz understands, it is not the outer voyage but the inner one that matters." --Los Angeles Times "Charmingly idiosyncratic." --Kirkus Reviews