Published by Virago / Picador, 2002, 288 pages.

This account of two railway journeys Jenny Diski took through the US—a short one, from Georgia to Arizona, and a longer one from New York circling the country—is not a conventional travel book. She hardly gets off the trains, except briefly. Diski is a smoker, and much of her time is spent in the smoking cabins of the various trains. She gets to know the other smokers who congregate there regularly and listens to their stories. And Diski, writing about her trip, goes back to her past and tells us hers. This is as much a memoir as a travel book.

Diski had a troubled childhood and spent some time in psychiatric hospitals. Living with her father and stepmother in London, she would spend hours traveling on the Tube (metro), the Circle Line, which had no final destination but kept going around endlessly. Diski travels “to keep still” and wants to be in places “where nothing much will happen”.

At the start of the book, she is in exactly that kind of place, on a freighter from the UK to the US—“a wriggly inlet” near Savannah, Georgia, to be precise—spending hours gazing at the sea. It is a tribute to her writing that she captures the fascination of looking at a vast expanse of water and the way it is constant and changing at the same time. But traveling means meeting other people, and she gets on well with the Croatian crew and less well with some of the other passengers (one couple in particular). On arrival, she decides to visit a friend in Phoenix, Arizona but because of Amtrak’s eccentric timing and schedules, this takes two days. And so begins the US trip.

Diski writes with empathy about most of the people she meets—Bet, an older woman from El Paso with a disabled son, a young model who is going home to nurse a blood clot in her brain, and a gentle drunk. Her observations are acute, and I could picture the people she writes about. This quote of hers sums up the book: “I am not in any of the places the train passes through. I am on the train… my real landscape is filled with strangers who are thrown together by the accident of travel.”

This review first appeared on Women on the Road.