Comparable Books for A Travel Memoir

A nonfiction book (including a travel memoir such as Wherever the Road Leads) is first presented to an agent or publisher in the form of a book proposal. One of the most important elements of this proposal is the section of competitive and complementary books. These are often called “Comps.”

I looked for narratives that matched my own in some way. I scanned memoir lists for woman authors who wrote of long road trips. These are popular, though most focus on solo travel and personal discovery. I found stories of travel with a man, told from the woman’s perspective, to be a rare commodity. Travel books that talked of the local cuisine were a  easier to find. Illustrated memoirs were also rare. Still, my search turned up many worthwhile books, and I developed a list of comps.

As I  composed my proposal, my go-to resource was How to Write A Book Proposal by Judy Rein and Michael Larsen. This extremely helpful book, published by Writers Digest Books, included an entire chapter devoted to comps. The authors write, “A well-constructed comps section will convince publishers that you . . . can judge your book accurately . . . [and] have a verifiable new slant.”

But it was the first sentence of the next page that opened my eyes to another factor. “Effective comparisons dig a hole your book will fill.” The things that made my memoir unique were as important as the similarities to my chosen comps. With this broadened understanding I set to work.

Here it is the comps section of my book proposal:

Comparative Titles

In the opening sentence of his introduction to Inventing the Truth (2018), William Zinsser says, “This is the age of memoir.” These days, travel memoirs, longtime staples of the genre, need to be more than descriptions of places visited. However, the medley of a personal relationship story and exciting travel experiences can be a winning combination.

A couple of best-selling memoirs of this type come to mind: Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and Without Reservations by Alice Steinbach. Because of their fame, I hesitate to list them as comps, though some parallels exist between Wherever the Road Leads and these two books. All three share a love story, an interest in food, travel to India and Italy, and are told by a female narrator. In fact, during the time frame of my memoir, I was only a few years younger than Elizabeth Gilbert when she made her journey.

Two other memoirs (not quite so famous) written by women traveling alone describe journeys to some of the same places Tom and I visited. In Nothing to Declare, Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone (published by Houghton Mifflin in1988), author Mary Morris recounts a long stay in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, the first major town Tom and I visited. Alden Jones writes of more contemporary travels in her collection of linked essays, The Blind Masseuse, A Traveler’s Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia (Terrace Books, 2013). The style and organization of this book differ quite a bit from my memoir. I was especially interested in Jones’ insights into the way travel changes the traveler, a phenomenon Tom and I certainly experienced and which I tried to show in my story. But these memoirs of solo adventure cannot show how travel changes two people and their relationship to each other, something that is integral to my story.

One of my favorite comps is An Embarrassment of Mangos: A Caribbean Interlude, by Ann Vanderhoof, published in 2004 by Broadway Books of Random House. This memoir, like Wherever the Road Leads, relates the intimate story of a young couple traveling in a tight space (a 42-foot sailboat) for two years. In her book, Vanderhoof highlights her introduction to and experimentation with Caribbean food. An Embarrassment of Mangos is sprinkled with cooking descriptions and recipes. Though I include experiences with food and cooking in my memoir, I also share my interest in art. The inclusion of artwork done during the journey will contribute a dimension that is rare.

We’ll Always Have Paris, by Jennifer Coburn, published in 2014 by Sourcebooks, is a travel memoir with a mother/daughter relationship at its heart. Though the story of a new marriage, Wherever the Road Leads mirrors Coburn’s honest storytelling. Like Coburn, I share my personal foibles, mistakes, and emotions through the use of detail and dialogue.

A more recent comparable memoir The Yellow Envelope, One Gift, Three Rules, and a Life-Changing Journey Around the World by Kim Dinan, was also published by Sourcebooks (2017). When Kim and her husband Brian decide to leave their homebound lives to follow her dream of world travel, they find the new lifestyle and stress of travel cause them to rethink their relationship. The nuances of the book’s premise (represented by the yellow envelope) of passing on “small acts of kindness to strangers,” is surpassed by Dinan’s story of change and growth, a theme shared by Wherever the Road Leads. Both books honestly tell of the ups and downs within a marriage. Throughout her memoir, Kim Dinan recounts her intimate thoughts, emotions, worries and concerns. My writing style in Wherever the Road Leads shows these things through dialogue and action rather than telling them through internal musings. Another big difference between the two memoirs is that Wherever the Road Leads takes place between 1971 and 1973 and includes travel to places no longer easily accessible (Afghanistan), while Kim and Brian’s story is set in a totally contemporary world (they Skype home and send emails!) and they travel by air, use local transportation, carry everything in their backpacks, and sleep in local apartments, homes, and hostel. Tom and I lived and drove for two years in a minivan.

This mode of travel is one of the things that sets my story apart from another comparable memoir, At Home in the World, by Tsh Oxenreider (2017, Nelson Books). As Oxenreider writes in her introduction, “I can shout from the rooftops that you can both love to travel and be happily married with children . . . Parenting and global travel—I can’t think of a better mix.” In the chapters about the visit of our school-age niece and nephew, Wherever the Road Leads shares the ups and downs (mainly ups) of travel with children. We tested the parent lifestyle and found it to our liking. In  many ways the tone of both my memoir and Tsh’s is similar. Like myself, Tsh uses details, conversation, a matter-of-fact attitude, and a touch of humor as she disclosures family interactions and personal foibles. But At Home in the World does not offer illustrations, maps, or the experience of van travel in the 1970s, all of which are primary features of Wherever the Road Leads.

I cannot help but mention here the memoir which influenced  Tom and me before we began our trip. I recently reread Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck (Viking Penguin, 1962) and was once again charmed by this simple story told by a literary icon of his travels in a truck-camper with his beloved poodle, Charlie.  Tom and I were inspired by the idea of a journey of exploration in a fitted-out vehicle camper. Steinbeck’s packing list, presented in one of the early chapters (similar to my description in chapter three of our van’s particulars), included (like ours) tools of all kinds, canned and dried food, notebooks, books, dishes, linens, too many clothes, and yes, a typewriter. I also brought my art supplies which were used far more often than Tom’s typewriter.
Memoirs are intensely personal stories, thus making comparative titles difficult to assess. I have done my best to find a few that work and hope the effort reveals a place in the travel memoir genre waiting to be filled by Wherever the Road Leads.

What do you think? Do you see a value in finding comps? As a reader, does these comparisons make you more eager to read Wherever the Road Leads?