Travel exerted its gravitational pull on Mary Morris when she was still a child, perhaps as the instinct to realize the dreams of a mother who longed to explore but was stuck at PTA and Girl Scout meetings.
But Morris hasn’t just traveled. She has turned her solo journeys — riding by train from Beijing to Berlin, on a battered old houseboat down the Mississippi and traipsing across India searching for an elusive white tiger — into an award-winning literary career.
The journeys themselves, however, have never been the point of either Morris’s fiction or nonfiction. They are the where but never the what or the why because, for this lyrical writer, story is everything.
While the odyssey across Italy at the heart of her latest novel, The Red House, takes readers deep into the landscapes of Brindisi, Puglia and Naples, the trip itself is fueled not by a wanderer’s curiosity about Italian towns and cities. Rather, it is driven by a woman’s quest to solve the mystery of her mother, who vanished one day, leaving behind only her purse, her keys and puzzling paintings of a red house.
That search turns into both a poignant foray into Italy’s dark past and a searing lesson in the way that gaps in our personal histories become the frameworks of our identities.
Author of three short story collections, five nonfiction travel books and ten novels, Mary Morris teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and blogs about travel and literature at The Writer and the Wanderer.