In Spite of Myself

A passionate travel memoir about life and love.

About In Spite of Myself 

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.

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About the author

After growing up in Kenya, Mary Fogarty has travelled whenever she can, acquiring languages and loving inappropriate men along the road. She spent time in Mexico in her early twenties and lived in Milan in her late twenties, teaching English. She has worked in publishing – on and off – since the 1990s and was a freelance medical journalist for over 20 years, but never stopped travelling. For four years she commuted to Perth (Australia) and then she switched to Spain, where she worked in a wacky hotel. Since 2014 she has worked in Marrakech (Morocco) as a travel guide, editor and translator. A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, she is the presenter of monthly meetings at The Globetrotters Club, edits their newsletter, Globe, and regularly gives talks there about her travels. In Spite of Myself is her first book.