Dispatches From The Road (with Diana Spechler)

The finale of Season 6 of the PREVAIL podcast.

I’ve known Diana Spechler since 2011, when both of us had books out at the same time, with the same publisher. Like me, she is a novelist. Like me, she is an essayist; she was, in fact, one of the original “Weeklings,” contributing brilliant and funny work to our now-defunct online daily. Like me, she has taught creative writing—far more extensively, in her case. Unlike me, she was still in her twenties when she got published. Unlike me, she has bylines in the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper’s, GQ, Esquire, Playboy, and the Washington Post. Unlike me, she is a travel writer. While I’ve been mostly sedentary, or else back and forth to the same few places, she’s been all over creation.

I love her work. Both of her novels—Who By Fire and Skinny—are excellent. Her creative nonfiction is reliably top notch, blending humor, wisdom, and insight with technical mastery. A few years back, I had the privilege of reading a snippet of a memoir she was working on that was incredible. So I was delighted when she started “Dispatches From The Road,” which is travel writing by way of creative nonfiction:

Here, Diana writes about that recent coinage, “solo travel”:

Women are solo travelers. Men who travel by themselves are enigmatic lone wolves. Intrepid, Odysseus-like heroes. Men swing from vines. Men wear carabiners hooked to their belt loops. Men carry knives to skin their own squirrels. . . .

Airlines, cruise lines, resorts, etc. aim to assuage women’s fears of traveling alone because, once pacified, we’ll buy the Solo Traveler package at that hotel; we’ll book a Solomoon; we’ll take a Solo Traveler cruise. We’re not singles, that humiliating moniker of old. We’ll solo-travel you all night long. We’ll eat-pray-love in a solo-traveler conga line. We’ll solo travel ‘til we drop.

Solo is, of course, more dignified than alone. Alone is a desperate howl: alooooone. Solo invokes performing an aria. Soaring above the clouds sans co-pilot. If you’re flying solo, you’ll never be alone, or alone’s intolerable cousin, lonely.

And dig this wonderful passage about romance:

As I sit here writing about romance, I wonder how I’m defining the word. Maybe it’s like porn—you know it when you see it. But I think romance has to do with idealization—attraction to whatever I perceive as perfect. After prolonged exposure, that veneer of perfection crumbles. Then we’re left with something weaker, something compromised. I’m ok with that, too; there’s beauty in the intimacy of prolonged exposure. But romance is that initial, exciting, miraculous feeling—walking through a foreign city; encountering art that brings me to tears; seeing the Tetons for the first time, through a windshield, at 22, when I had no idea such a shape existed.

For this, the finale of Season 6 of the PREVAIL podcast, I wanted to deviate from the usual talk about horrible things being done by horrible people. I wanted to discuss writing and art and the future of the novel and how certain works of art can move me to tears. And I wanted to know what was happening in the rest of the world—if our global neighbors think we Americans are all loony-tunes. So I asked Diana to join me on the show.

On my first trip to Berlin after Trump was elected, I could detect a difference in how I was perceived. People looked at us funny. It was a marked change. I asked Diana if she had a similar experience.

“You know, you’re right that during the Trump years,” she tells me, “I found not necessarily that I was being judged automatically, but everybody wanted to talk about it. And I think one of the things that has surprised me about traveling and also kind of embarrassed me is how aware the rest of the world is of our politics. We don’t know anything about what’s going on in a lot, you know, in many other countries, most other countries. And everyone knows what’s going on here.”

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

S6 E18: SEASON FINALE: Dispatches from the Road (with Diana Spechler)

Greg Olear welcomes his friend, the novelist, essayist and travel writer Diana Spechler. They discuss the novel as an art form, writing as a profession and vocation, the allure of travel, how the U.S. is perceived abroad, the future of the country, separating art from the artist, the Stendhal effect, and more. Plus: his name is Leo.

Follow Diana:
https://twitter.com/DianaSpechler

Subscribe to “Dispatches from the Road”:

PREVAIL is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/greg.

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PROGRAMMING NOTES:

• The PREVAIL podcast returns on Friday, February 16.

• There will be no live Five 8 show tonight, because certain people have covid—and by “certain people,” I mean me.

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Photo credit: Diana Spechler. Northern Italy.