Writer Bill Bryson tackles travel bores, being a style icon and a life with too many goodbyes

“NOBODY wants to see your holiday snaps.” Bill Bryson on the challenges of travel writing, being a style icon and a life with too many goodbyes.

Bill Bryson lived in the Yorkshire Dales, England, for eight years.

ACCLAIMED author Bill Bryson is best known for his travel books including Down Under, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America and Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe.

A former newspaper journalist, the US-born, England-based Bryson is touring Australia this month in conversation with Ray Martin.

He spoke with Peter Holmes from his home in Hampshire.

Bill Bryson attends a book signing at Mt Barker Public Library, South Australia, in 2006.

WE’VE all met travel bores over the years. Have you had to consciously avoid becoming one?

BB: (Laughs) I don’t know if I’ve ever succeeded. I couldn’t answer that question myself, you’d have to ask my children. What’s really important when I’m writing a travel book is to bear in mind (readers) don’t want to know what you’ve done. Nobody wants to see your holidays snaps. Just because you had a great experience doesn’t necessarily mean anyone else is going to be interested. So you have to work extra hard to take the reader along with you, and that is the challenge of successful travel writing.

Your show in Australia is billed as a “wickedly entertaining conversation ... Bryson has a charm, wit, ruminative insight and modesty that will have audiences hanging on his every softly spoken word”. So, no pressure then?

BB: Yeah. I don’t know what to expect; I’ve never done anything quite like this before. I just had a meeting in London with the man who is producing it and he’s got some wonderful ideas. So instead of just me being interviewed on stage by Ray Martin, there is going to be some other stuff, film footage. It sounds very promising. I will certainly do my best to be all of those things you’ve described, but I also have to say there’s no money back guarantee with this.

Travellers have to say a lot of goodbyes, whether to family or people they’ve met along the way. Does it get any easier?

BB: That happens a lot. I’ve been extremely lucky to have lived an unexpectedly rich life, going to lots of countries and meeting a lot of people, and the frustration is what you’ve touched on.

It becomes almost impossible to keep up all those friendships. That’s probably the most frustrating thing of my life. To give you one small example: we lived eight very happy years in the Yorkshire Dales in England, and then we moved elsewhere and I really don’t see my friends there or go back as often as I’d like to.

One friend in particular was for many years my best friend and I hardly see him at all nowadays, and that fills me with a kind of sadness.

In a way you can have too much of a good thing in terms of experiences.

Bill Bryson lived in the Yorkshire Dales, England, for eight years.

How long did it take you to make sense of what Yorkshiremen and women were saying?

BB: Some of the things I never did understand. There were a few people who had lived there forever and I couldn’t understand a thing they said, I honestly couldn’t. You’d be talking to them in the pub and I never knew whether to laugh or nod my head solemnly. I didn’t know if they were telling me a joke or that their dog had died. That was awkward. I was always a little bit guarded in my conversations in the pub.

Bill Bryson’s travel book Down Under.

In the book Down Under you walked west from the Sydney CBD along Victoria Rd, across the Gladesville Bridge and back into the city via the northern suburbs. It was a long, odd trek, and one few, if any, Sydneysiders would undertake. Does this happen a lot around the world?

BB: Yeah, and sometimes you have really good experiences and sometimes fairly bad experiences. My favourite thing in the world in terms of travelling is to arrive in a big city and go for a walk without really knowing quite where I’m going.

I like not to read guide books, and I like to have only a basic idea of the geography. I wander. And you know, as you say, go over a bridge and see where it takes you. Sometimes it takes you into some pretty unattractive districts, which are just filled with second-hand car dealerships and factories, but other times you end up in the most wonderful residential areas.

For his book Down Under, Bill Bryson walked from Sydney’s CBD, across the Gladesville Bridge and back into the city via the northern suburbs.

I once did a US road trip from Michigan through Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. No offence, but your home city of Des Moines, Iowa, didn’t make the itinerary. If I ever get back, how many days do I need to put aside?

BB: I’m very proud of Des Moines but if you don’t have a personal connection to the place there really isn’t any reason to go there at all, I’m afraid.

It has a river running through it.

BB: It does, but as you crossed Missouri and Indiana, you saw exactly the same sort of things you’d have seen if you’d crossed into Iowa. The Midwest is the Midwest and it’s all very pleasant, nice farming country and really lovely people.

So I can tick it off the list and no-one will notice?

BB: If you went to Iowa now you wouldn’t think, “Oh my God, this has really transformed my life”. You’d think, “I’ve been here before”.

What are your travel plans for 2014?

BB: Very little. I had an unusually busy year last year. I went on five trips to the States and so I’m looking forward to having a year where I don’t do so much. I moved house in November so we’d like to spend some time here settling in to the house, getting to know the neighbourhood and neighbours.

Bill Bryson says travel “gives you a much greater appreciation for what you’ve got at home, or how you might improve it”.

I’ve heard Australians say they’ll never go overseas because Australia is the best country on earth and there is no need. Can you fathom this?

BB: It’s a very American sentiment and I’m surprised to hear you say it about Australians because Australians always seem like such well-travelled people. They seem to be more naturally inquisitive.

But there are always people who don’t want to go anywhere and I think that’s a great pity because two things happen when you travel – you find out there are other ways of doing things, and that sometimes they are better; and sometimes they’re not done half as well. But it gives you a much greater appreciation for what you’ve got at home, or how you might improve it. Why people wouldn’t want to do that is a mystery to me.

Your first travel book The Palace Under the Alps was published in the mid-1980s when you were in your mid-30s. You were working at a newspaper in England and had a young child. Your Dad died about a year later. Given that he was a sportswriter, do you think about what he would’ve made of your career?

BB: He was a very good (writer), and he was a great influence on me. I’d like to think he’d be very proud and pleased for my success. It was the first time anybody close to me had died; it was a big shock to realise that people go, and life isn’t eternal.

Did you ever get feedback from him on your journalism?

BB: My Dad was sort of old school, he wasn’t very demonstrative, he wasn’t very good at praising. I think a lot of people of his generation were like that, and he couldn’t express himself very well; he wasn’t very good at emotions. He never said anything very much, and I don’t know if he ever would’ve said anything very much, but at the same time you could kind of tell he was proud and pleased.

Despite his success as a writer Bill Bryson says his readers don’t actually get to know him, “they know part of me”.

Do you remember the last time you sat at the back of the plane?

BB: Well as it happens only a couple of weeks ago. My wife and I were in America and we flew from San Francisco to Denver. It was only two-and-a- half hours and I bought economy class tickets.

I have to admit it was something of a novelty as I haven’t been back there a lot.

Usually trips are paid for by publishers or whatever and they nearly always put me in business class.

It was amazing how long it takes to board an American plane because they all take such huge carry-on bags; the overhead bins are filled well before all the people are on the plane, so they have to take bags off and check them through. It takes forever to get an American plane loaded up and ready to go.

When you released your memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, you were quoted in a the UK newspaper saying: “In all of my books, I’m basically telling you the truth, but only a portion of the truth. You don’t really get to know me.” Why hold stuff back?

BB: No, it’s not so much a desire for privacy or anything. It’s just inevitable when you’re presenting yourself publicly to the world you’re only go to show so much.

You do the same thing; the guys you work with, they’re only going to see a certain aside of you. You’re not going to weep in front of them; you’re not going to be tender in front of them; or shout in the same way you might shout at your wife in an argument. What I mean is that people read the books and think they know me, and I was trying to explain that actually they don’t, they know part of me. Other parts of me are not relevant to telling the story.

Beards are back. Do you take credit?

BB: I take complete credit.

Yes. I’ve been a style icon for all these decades, and finally now people are taking notice.

Bill Bryson tours Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra and Melbourne from March 14-22.

For information and bookings see lateralevents.com

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