On Goals, the “Gypsy” Women of Sicily, and Opening to Life

Looking back and ahead, but mostly ahead, because that is what you do this time of year

Hello from Sicily! New year, new country. And what an incredible beginning it has been. I’ll write more about Sicily in my next letter, which will update free and paid subscribers on my life in Siciliy, what I’m writing, and what I’m reading. For now, here some blood oranges from the market in Catania:

But this letter is part of the paid subscription for my behind-the-scenes essays. (In my last letter, I discussed my transition to Substack and what the paid subscription is about.) This letter will be about looking back and looking ahead (it’s that time of year, right?) and what it means to be a “gypsy” woman, and opening to life.

The New Year

A new year, like an extended journey, makes us consider where we have been and where we are going. I’m on month four of my travels. I have no specific endpoint in mind, no place, no specific identity I hope to arrive at. Where will my journey end up? Where am I headed? Who will I become? I don’t have a crystal ball. And as I wrote in my last letter, I’m leaning into that. But sometimes, especially now with the dawn of the new year, I think, shouldn’t I have a goal of some sort?

I’m currently coaching a writer who is working on a memoir of her two years of travels through Asia. In our attempts to create a shape for her narrative, I’m encouraging her to nail down what her goal was as she set out on her journey. What did she hope for? What was she looking for?

Usually when we travel, we’re just looking for a break from our normal life. Our goal is simply to relax or discover something new—travel as diversion, if you will. But the kind of journey she was on, and the kind I’m on as well, is about something larger. It’s like a reset, a time out, but also with the intention of finding something new—a new sense of self and/or a new life. So there is a goal of sorts, although we may not know exactly what that is when we set out. In my case, I am looking for what moves me, what fulfills me and brings me joy, and a place that makes me want to stay. How does one set a goal out of that?

Looking back ten years on her extended travels, the writer I’m working with still finds it hard to nail down what exactly her goal was. But a travel narrative, if not the journey itself, needs an intended goal, a desired outcome, something the protagonist wants. Just like in a novel, our characters’ deep desires are what drive the story. When we ourselves are the main character, though, gaining that kind of clarity is difficult.

I’ve thought a lot in the past about how people’s lives are translated onto the page—how lived experience becomes story in biography, memoir, autofiction, and biographical fiction. It all fascinates me. One of my favorite teaching experiences was a course called “Writing Lives.” We read books like Colm Toibin’s The Master, a novel about Henry James, and Jean Strouse’s acclaimed biography of Alice James, as well as Woolf’s Orlando, Janet Malcom’s The Silent Woman, Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, and many shorter pieces.

I also taught many times various courses on the theme of writing women’s lives. The last time I taught one, during the pandemic, I included a unit on travel (after we had done units on family, slavery, and motherhood). Historically, travel has been one of the most important ways in which new possibilities have opened up for women’s lives—and women’s stories. I was interested in exploring what women’s journeys looked like as they ventured beyond family and the domestic sphere, often on their own. One of the books we read may be the most popular women’s travel narrative ever written: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love.

Gilbert set out with three very clear goals: to eat her way through Italy (in other words, to devote herself to pleasure), to pray in India (or to find inner peace), and to find a way to balance the two in Bali. Her original title may have been something like Eat, Pray, Balance. (She did, in fact, write a proposal for the book and get an advance to write it, before her trip, so it must have had a title.) But what she found in Bali was something far more conventional, according to my students, when she stumbled upon romance and love. Like so many of the stories told about women lives, it ended with her finding a man.