The curious allure of expat life
What makes a person give up their homeland and relocate somewhere entirely different?
What makes a person give up their homeland and relocate somewhere entirely different? Love is a common impetus, work transfers and study provide temporary reasons, but the most interesting determiner, and the one that results in the best memoirs and narratives, is an eagerness to engage with another society and culture. And, invariably, to chronicle the adventure.
The truly immersive of the non-fiction transplant genre get to grips with the minutiae of the writer’s chosen destination. I’ve been dipping into many such books during the past 12 months, marvelling at the bravery, and occasional audacity, of those who’ve forged new lives in often baffling places. Any work by expatriate Englishman Tim Parks, who’s made Italy his home since 1981, gets a tick from me. To understand labyrinthine bureaucracy, from buying a house to a rail ticket, and to get an insight into village life, I particularly recommend Italian Neighbours (1992). Parks’s undiminished love for his adopted home mitigates his frustrating experiences in a way that far surpasses Frances Mayes’s Tuscan idyll and Peter Mayle’s accounts of a Pommie duffer abroad in Provence.
Tales of teaching endeavours in unlikely places? Consider the likes of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler or Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan by Jamie Zeppa. For a lasting conversion, check Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Andalucia by Chris Stewart (former drummer for Genesis) and its sequel, The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society, also set in Spain.
Some lesser-known authors rely on catchy titles. I give you: The Year of Living Danishly and Things Can Only Get Feta. Say no more. Others take a more philosophical approach, musing on why, for example, the poetry of place names alone can be enough to entice us. I once considered spending a year in Crackpot, North Yorkshire, just to write a book.
A friend of mine who runs classes in memoir writing emphasises what I’ve long believed. “All of us have life stories to tell,” she says. And a West Australian reader, Graham Shearwood, recently sent me a copy of To Sweden with Love: Memories of the 1970s (Augusta Press), an account of settling in Stockholm in the 1970s, with his wife, Wendy. The sojourn was to spark a lifelong passion. “We didn’t want to live in an expat bubble ... and that meant learning not only the language but the cultural norms,” he says.
In 2009, they returned and bought a holiday cottage in the province of Blekinge, in Sweden’s far southeast corner, which they owned for nine years. The village is called Stora Silpinge. A quick Google search leads to a near-blank local map. The ideal spot to disconnect and write a book, I say.