The collection of personal essays, Someone Traveling, chronicles one life unfolding in the aftermath of murder. Each of the essays tells a story that crosses internal and external boundaries like acts of grieving do. Grieving consciously and unconsciously, the widow travels.
Someone Traveling is a name borrowed in order to relate stories about all sorts of travel from short jaunts for local color to metaphorical outings on the displacements and harbors of loss. Someone Traveling tells of experiments in travel rather than well thought-out itinerary or once-for-all arriving. How to account for the displacements wrought by murder-self, home, wandering/staying put, healing, memory, intention, myth/history-and what to make of all this transformation? From nearly the first moment, the notes of intimacy in grieving the lover lay the ground for everything else. And although intruders like publicity trouble her grieving, somehow the traveler abides in intimacy. In these essays, the widow goes to this place and that, quite uncharted, to do what was never before required by her. The traveler meets allies she never thought to know before. New intimacies, made-up intimacies abound. The first of these is found in healing sessions.
The intensely intimate register of the personal essay proves supple enough for telling of being lost like an out-of-reach memory as well as for creating connection like a new set of nerves. In this collection, intimate stuff, inner stuff is celebrated as the stuff we all know something about. In intimacy, we find commonalities and particularities to excavate for knowing ourselves and others and for reconciling with the world.
