In Spite of Myself : From mountains and men to swimming and souks

If you have ever felt too shy, too old, or too plain for adventure - In Spite of Myself is for you. Growing up as a painfully timid child in Kenya, Mary Fogarty discovers that independence is not something you are born with - it is something you swim towards, stumble upon, and seize when nobody is watching. Sometime journalist, sometime travel guide, always an outsider (and always a swimmer), Fogarty looks back on decades of spontaneous solo travel across five continents with self-deprecating honesty, warmth, and razor-sharp wit. Wherever she journeys - from Milan to Mexico, Perth to Peru, mountains to souks - she feels marked by difference. Her teenage self is branded an African savage at a British convent school; in Italy she is a country bumpkin in the city yet the only foreigner in the village; in Australia, the lone Pom in a Macedonian community; in Spain, the only single expat among couples. Sometimes following love, sometimes finding it once she arrives, Fogarty flings herself into relationships both magnificent and disastrous - with a cast of unlikely characters no novelist would dare invent. Gawp as she meets an Egyptian doctor on the night train to Cairo; takes off across the desert with a Syrian bus driver in search of a hotel that serves alcohol; shares a sleeping bag with a Sherpa on the descent from Everest to cure her altitude sickness; encounters an Omar Sharif lookalike in Australia, only to discover he is sleeping in his office and growing marijuana in the flowerpots - and is nearly murdered by the new girlfriend of her Berber ex-lover in Marrakech. Simultaneously intensely personal and irresistibly universal, In Spite of Myself is for anyone who worries about being alone - and proof that there is always a way, and you can do it on your own.