The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure
The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost opens with Friedman's decision to spend a summer in Ireland during college. After leaving Ireland, she continues on to Australia and then backpacks through South America. Misgivings plague her throughout the book — that she isn't living up to her parents' expectations, that she's wasting her life traveling, that she has become disconnected from the "real world" — but they never outweigh her love of the journey.
Quote:
"As centuries of inebriated Irish before me have surely found strange wisdom at the bottom of their Guinness glasses, so too do I as I polish off my third one: apparently, I am not the center of the universe, and the earth will continue to revolve around the sun whether or not I decided to spend a puposeless summer in Ireland. This is the kind of revelation that is liberating when you are drunk, and rather depressing when you are sober, but luckily, at the moment I am the former."
Author:
Rachel Friedman has lived, worked, or traveled in twenty countries. She currently teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost is her first book.
Published: 2011
Length: 386 pages
Set in: Australia, Ireland, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Chile