Bad Tourist

“I love travel, armchair and otherwise, so I knew it would be a pleasure letting Suzanne Roberts take me around the world on a shoestring, from India’s Grand Elephant Festival, to the steppes of Mongolia on the trail of Genghis Khan, to the cool tiles of another one-star bathroom wondering if this would be the time she’d puke herself to death. Even more satisfying are her honesty, courage, and eventual clarity as she tackles her own understories—family dysfunction and alcoholism, internalized misogyny, and what the climate catastrophe means for the travel addicted among us—combining these essays into a thoroughly relatable journey of the heart.”—Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country
“If Michel de Montaigne and Chelsea Handler could get together in a bar in some far-flung part of the world and get good and drunk, they might dream up a book like this. This is not your parents’ travel writing! If you’re thirsting for a literary triple shot of sex, booze, and misadventures, Bad Tourist is your passport to a trip you won’t want to come home from.”—Michael P. Branch, author of Rants from the Hill and How to Cuss in Western
“Bad Tourist makes beautiful the absurdity and heartbreak accompanying us whenever we leave home. Roberts’s intimate, fiercely honest narrative voice imbues these realities with grace and demonstrates just how much is to be gained by living a life in the present tense.”—Kathryn Miles, author of Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake
“These thoughtful, hilarious, lusty essays will either have you renewing your passport or blowtorching it for good. Suzanne Roberts may be a bad tourist, but she’s one hell of a great writer.”—Gayle Brandeis, author of The Art of Misdiagnosis
“Suzanne Roberts’s journey—both inward and outward—is illuminated by eloquent portraits of countries, cultures, and compassionate insights into human nature. I love this book.”—Ann Marie Brown, travel writer and guidebook author
“In an age where cultures, people, and places are so easily objectified, reduced to abstractions, commodities, or statistics, Bad Tourist is a collection that returns us, thankfully, to earth. Across India and Mongolia to Mexico and California, Suzanne Roberts shares the view at ground level, the brutality and grace and sometimes transcendence in the lives of everyday people. She reminds us that travel can be an act of remembrance. This is an important and moving work.”—David Miller, travel writer and documentary filmmaker