Debutiful

I thought this was going to be an essay about how adventure books help me sleep (I find it terribly difficult to sleep), but as I was choosing which books to include, I realized something else bound these books: there is a wisdom to the authors. Their stories – which range from raising orphaned grizzly cubs in Russia to meditating alone in a Himalayan cave for over a decade – tend to start from a place of fear: fear of solitude, of discomfort, of cold weather, of shoddy bedding and meager rations and avalanches and wildfires and poachers and all the sorry and terrifying things of the world. But over time, that fear becomes acceptance, and love, for the world as it is. That is freedom, to be humbled by the world until one truly feels one’s connection to it. 

But what does this have to do with my debut novel Hovel, where the narrator is living in the mountains but not exactly raising grizzly cubs? (Her job involves editing internet videos of kittens doing cute things.) Really, she is not feeling so connected to the world. Yet that changes as she embarks on the smallest of adventures – cooking by candlelight, peeing in the woods, foraging in places where foraging definitely isn’t allowed. It is transgressive, in this day and age, to do even these small things. Yet adventure books like the following make me believe probing the world from as many new angles as possible does have meaning.