In Spite of Myself is an eclectic, passionate travel memoir about life and love across many countries - and one that will strike a chord with many a reader. Mary Fogarty grows up in Kenya, a painfully shy child, timid and fearful of all that Africa holds. Only through swimming does she gain some confidence to expand her boundaries - and an independent life begins. Sometime journalist and travel guide but always an outsider (and always a swimmer) Mary Fogarty looks back on the thrills and spills of decades worth of independent, spontaneous travel. Wherever she journeys, from Milan to Mexico and Perth to Peru, and from mountains and men to Speedos and souks, she feels marked by difference. Her teenage self is regarded as an African savage at her British convent school; in Italy, she is a country bumpkin in the city, yet the only foreigner in the village and, in both, the sole woman who drinks; in Australia, she is the lone Pom in a Macedonian community; in Spain, the only single expat amid a community of couples. Sometimes following love, sometimes finding it once she arrives, Fogarty also celebrates the intensity of emotional and physical attraction flinging herself into relationships both good and bad, often with unlikely characters. Gawp as Fogarty meets an Egyptian doctor on the night train to Cairo; takes off across the desert with a Syrian bus driver to find a hotel where alcohol is served; shares a sleeping bag with a Sherpa to cure her altitude sickness on the descent from Everest; encounters an Omar Sharif lookalike in Australia, only to discover he is sleeping in his office, and growing marijuana in the office flower bed; and is nearly murdered by the new girlfriend of her Berber ex-lover in Marrakech.Simultaneously intensely personal and irresistibly universal, In Spite of Myself is for anyone who worries about being alone, who thinks they are too old or too plain or too shy to have adventures. As Mary makes clear through exhilarating, amusing storytelling, there is always a way and you CAN do it on your own.
