Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

While I was adrift, thoughts of my children had occupied me. It’s not that I have such a high opinion of myself as a parent, but I do have a sense of my responsibility. Back on land, we decided not to tell George what had happened. I thought it would frighten him, as it was still frightening me. But while I was largely silent, he eagerly recounted his adventures of the morning—what he’d eaten for breakfast, where he and Sue had been digging, what washed-up shells and twigs he had found, and how far he’d swum all by himself. In the urgency of his speech, I found the complement to my mishap. I understood that the daredevilry of ordering eel for lunch or going skydiving or visiting war-torn lands pale in comparison to the adventurous domesticity of being a parent, which involves simultaneously reckoning with the vastness of the world and agreeing, at least for a little while, to be that vastness to one’s children.

Acknowledgments

When I set out to assemble this book, I suffered under the gross misapprehension that an anthology would involve merely scanning some things I wrote a long time ago and sending them to my publisher. In fact, the process has entailed selecting the articles; writing the introduction to the collection; composing prologues and epilogues; and endlessly polishing essays I’d already written, some of which had to be reworked. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that he didn’t want to repeat his innocence, but that he’d like to repeat the pleasure of losing it, and putting together an anthology of this kind provided a chance to grow out of my naïveté all over again.

The trip down memory lane was a return not only to my bygone adventures but also to the editors with whom I’d worked on the original pieces. I have been fortunate both in being sent to fantastic places and in having my reports on them edited with exquisite care. I thank Nicholas Coleridge and Meredith Etherington-Smith at Harpers & Queen, who sent me out on my first big reporting trips, and believed in me before there was any apparent reason to do so. For their guidance at the New York Times Magazine, I thank Jack Rosenthal, Adam Moss, and Annette Grant, who helped me grow into myself and find an audience. At the New Republic, I was fortunate to work with David Shipley. In connection with my work for the New Yorker, I thank David Remnick, Henry Finder, Amy Davidson, and Sasha Weiss for their sterling care. As soon as she took over Travel + Leisure, Nancy Novogrod began sending me everywhere I’d always wanted to go; she gave me a bigger and better life than I would ever have had without her. Our decades of collaboration are among the bright spots of my professional and personal life. I also thank the editors with whom I worked at T+L, particularly Sheila Glaser and the wonderful Luke Barr. For her support at Food & Wine, I thank Dana Cowin; no one has ever had a better friend, and I’d gladly have given the world away in exchange for the joy her generous affection and steady wisdom have given me. I thank Catherine Burns and all her colleagues at the Moth for the steadfast good humor with which they helped me to craft stories.

As always, I am deeply grateful to my glorious editor at Scribner, Nan Graham, whose trademark mix of loyalty, integrity, genius, and kindness has become an organizing force for my work and beyond my work. Also invaluable on the Scribner team are Brian Belfiglio and the divine Kate Lloyd, my beloved publicists; Daniel Loedel, whose calm patience protected me from stressful bureaucracy time and again; and dear, dear Roz Lippel, who publishes with such bighearted enthusiasm; also to the tireless Katie Rizzo, who filtered endless corrections with infinite patience. I am grateful to Steven Henry Boldt for his excellent copyediting, and to Eric Rayman for his careful legal read. At Chatto & Windus, I thank my entirely splendid editor, Clara Farmer, and her perfectly delightful deputy, Juliet Brooke. I thank David Solomon for the photo for the cover, Gh. Farouq Samim for the picture on the spine, Luca Trovato for the frontispiece photo, and Claire Jones for her work on digitizing these images. I thank Julia Mandeville for her help in conceptualizing the cover, and Jaya Miceli for the beautiful jacket design.

My agent, Andrew Wylie, has been the guiding light of my career, and with each book, I appreciate anew how lucky I am to have him as my representative and friend. I am also grateful to the others at the Wylie Agency who have devoted themselves unstintingly to this work: Jeffrey Posternak, Sarah Chalfant, Charles Buchan, Percy Stubbs, and Alba Ziegler-Bailey.