A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life

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In these essays, Marcia simultaneously navigates the globe while carving out a second career as a travel writer for major magazines, while navigating her own past and the bumpy and sometimes complicated road of midlife.

Marcias voice has quiet power, restraint and unadulterated honesty. She is unafraid to reveal her vulnerabilities, hurts and failures. Her narrative style has won her many accolades, including five Lowell Thomas Awards for excellence in travel journalism, and the 2021 Solas Award for Travel Story of the year.

Above all, her stories are about restlessless, the human desire to keep moving. As such, her stories have joyful exuberance and a sense of wonder, and pack a strong emotional punch.

The essays appeal to anyone who craves a strong storytelling voice, especially from a writer with an astonishing lifetime of stories working for Barbara Walters at ABC News, and traveling the world as an international journalist.

These rich essays dig deep into human vulnerability, and concern the intersection of time and place, home and the road, the past and the present, and will ignite the readers imagination.

Marcia is an experienced working journalist, and is deeply cognizant of cultural sensitivities. With a master's degree in foreign policy from Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, she also comes to her work with high intellectual awareness. Though her writing is full of wonder, her work as a traveler is not about what she discovers, especially in developing countries, but rather, what the place helps her discover about herself.

Many of these essays have been published in leading outlets: Vogue, Travel + Leisure, BBC, Town & Country, LitHub, The Millions, Creative Nonfiction, The New York Times, Air Mail, to name but a few, and Marcia retains excellent relationships with her editors in these publications.

Marcias prior book, 100 PLACES IN FRANCE EVERY WOMAN SHOULD GO, debuted as a New York Times Travel Bestseller.

All of these essays, some in a memoir format about people she met long ago in her travels as a foreign correspondent, were written between the ages of 50 and 60. Women, especially women of a certain age, are hungry for inspiring, literary stories told by someone relatable, whom they trust. Women are 13 percent more likely than men to have read a book in the last year.

Books of essays are ideally suited for our attention-challenged population, and each of Marcias essays are fully formed narratives that are both subtle and powerful.

Writing is Marcias second career, and this book will be emboldening to its readers and may inspire them to pick up their pens and write, mine their past for a story about a memory that has stayed with them. Marcia teaches at the annual Book Passage Travel Writing Conference, and has witnessed first-hand the passion of female or middle-aged reader-writers, or both, seeking literary role models.

Broad target audience to readers of bold travel writing and fans of Anthony Bourdain, Mary Morris, Andrew McCarthy, Elizabeth Gilbert, Cheryl Strayed, Paul Theroux, Peter Mayle, Alain de Botton, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Martha Gellhorn, Natalia Ginzburg, Sara Wheeler, Don George, Jan Morris.

Broad parallel target audience to readers of meditative essays about life, parenting, aging, womanhood including fans of Dani Shapiro, Jo Ann Beard, Leslie Jamieson, Rebecca Solnit, Mary Laura Philpott, Sloane Crossley.

Marcia has a devoted following of readers, students and other travel writers worldwide, and has lectured at womens clubs throughout the world.

Marcia has contacts at all the major networks, podcasts geared to travel, book podcasts, podcasts about women, and podcasts about women over 50. She also has strong relationships with Maria Shrivers SUNDAY PAPER newsletter (250,000 subscribers).

Reviews

Praise for A Hard Place to Leave

Intrepid and empathetic, gifted with the dispassionate gaze of a born observera harmonious collage of worldview and character, a wunderkammer of experiences in a life fully lived. Melissa Febos, The New York Times

Dazzling.inspiring and beautifully written, A Hard Place to Leave is a must-read for any woman travelerand a must-read for women in general. Forbes

Along the way, DeSanctis encounters spies and love interests, but its her lushly polished writing that makes this book a joy to read. The Washington Post

The essays might be framed as travel writing, but they are just as much stories of self-definition that take place here, there, and everywhere. Vogue

ExcellentI cant rave about it enough. Air Mail

The luminous essays of journalist Marcia DeSanctiss A Hard Place to Leave juxtapose the restless search for elsewhere with longing for home. ForeWord Magazine starred review

DeSanctis writes fabulously, brutally and beautifully. Electric Lit

Marcia DeSanctis is an icon in the realm of travel writing, and essay writing as well. Air Mail

These probing, achingly beautiful essays form an indelible portrait of a life. Who is this woman with her many, at times contradictory, facets She is an adventurer, journalist, wife, mother, daughter, her world set spinning by the brilliance of her mind, the tenacity of her love for her family, and the intensity of her longing to be anywhere but here. Through the very act of interrogating her own restlessness, Marcia DeSanctis provides us with a tantalizing window into a rich and singular world. Dani Shapiro, New York Times bestselling author of Inheritance

Marcia DeSanctiss A Hard Place to Leave is perfumed with lush, luminous language as she sweeps us all across the globe. From Moscow to Cape Town, quiet New England to Sweden, these tender portraits grow on us like a spring garden. Aimee Nezhukumatathil, New York Times bestselling author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

DeSanctis weaves together both ordinary and extraordinary life events to reveal universal truths. Princeton Alumni Weekly

These essays are pulled from a decade of writing and span 40 years of experience and inquiry, with intimate pictures of home woven throughout. Theyre honest, warm, and thoughtful. This collection feels relatable to both a reader who might be a world traveler and also someone who wants to take those journeys via the written word. Lisa Peet, Bloom

Never has a travel memoir put the ordinary and the extraordinary in such tight and revelatory conversation. A Hard Place to Leave brims over with intelligence and human truth. More than just a recounting of a life boldly and peripatetically lived, its a reckoning with the passage of time, with ones own undying urges. I knew myself better by the end of this book, thanks to the fierce honesty and perpetual questing of Marcia DeSanctis. Colleen Kinder, editor of Letter to a Stranger

There is such honesty and feeling on every page of Marcia DeSanctiss bookher avowal to push past the conventional boundaries of womens lives, her rediscovery of travel and solitude, her celebration of family, friendship, and homecomingthat I felt delightedly transported and deeply inspired. Jasmin Darznik, New York Times bestselling author of The Bohemians

To read this masterfully composed memoir is to better understand our beautiful, broken world, our complex tethers to home and family, and our own imperfect selves. DeSanctis is brilliantly attuned to the nuances of these subjects, and she navigates the hairpin turns between the three with breathtaking curiosity, elegance, wisdom, and generosity. The essays in A Hard Place to Leave are equal parts dark and luminous, ferocious and tender, universal and intimateand the writing is some of the finest Ive ever read in my whole damn life. Lavinia Spalding, author of Writing Away and editor of The Best Womens Travel Writing

Mountain climbing. Love affairs. Diplomats who may be spies, or love affairs, or both. Marcia DeSanctiss travel essays are thoughtful, stylish, and loaded with charm. Its the kind of book that goes great with a glass of wine and a strong dose of wanderlust. Rosecrans Baldwin, author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles

Marcia DeSanctis is one of the finest travel writers working todaya spellbinding new book of travel essays Pauline Frommer, The Frommers Travel Show

Author Bio

Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist, essayist, and author of 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, a New York Times travel bestseller. She has won five Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and is the recipient of two Grand Prize Solas Awards including the 2021 Gold Award for Travel Story of the Year. Before becoming a writer, she was a television news producer for ABC, NBC and CBS News. She lives in Connecticut.