In Spite of Myself : From mountains and men to swimming and souks

In Spite of Myself: is an eclectic, passionate travel memoir about life and love - from mountains and men to Speedos and souks - across many countries. From Milan to Mexico, and Africa to Australia, journalist, swimmer and perpetual outsider Mary Fogarty revisits the thrills and spills of decades' worth of independent, spontaneous travel.

If you have ever felt too shy, too old, or too plain for adventure - In Spite of Myself is for you.Growing up as a painfully timid child in Kenya, Mary Fogarty discovers that independence is not something you are born with - it is something you swim towards, stumble upon, and seize when nobody is watching. Sometime journalist, sometime travel guide, always an outsider (and always a swimmer), Fogarty looks back on decades of spontaneous solo travel across five continents with self-deprecating honesty, warmth, and razor-sharp wit.Wherever she journeys - from Milan to Mexico, Perth to Peru, mountains to souks - she feels marked by difference. Her teenage self is branded an African savage at a British convent school; in Italy she is a country bumpkin in the city yet the only foreigner in the village; in Australia, the lone Pom in a Macedonian community; in Spain, the only single expat among couples. Sometimes following love, sometimes finding it once she arrives, Fogarty flings herself into relationships both magnificent and disastrous - with a cast of unlikely characters no novelist would dare invent.Gawp as she meets an Egyptian doctor on the night train to Cairo; takes off across the desert with a Syrian bus driver in search of a hotel that serves alcohol; shares a sleeping bag with a Sherpa on the descent from Everest to cure her altitude sickness; encounters an Omar Sharif lookalike in Australia, only to discover he is sleeping in his office and growing marijuana in the flowerpots - 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 - and proof that there is always a way, and you can do it on your own.