A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life

by Marcia DeSanctis Narrated by Marcia DeSanctis

Overview

“Intrepid and empathetic, gifted with the dispassionate gaze of a born observer...a harmonious collage of worldview and character, a wunderkammer of experiences in a life fully lived.” -Melissa Febos, The New York Times

“DeSanctis encounters spies and love interests, but it's her lushly polished writing that makes this book a joy to read.” -The Washington Post

Restless to leave, eager to return: this memoir in essays captures the unrelenting pull between the past and the present, between traveling the world and staying home.

Starting in a dreary Moscow hotel room in 1983, weaving back and forth to rural New England, and ending on a West Texas trail in 2020, Marcia DeSanctis tells stories that span the globe and half a lifetime. With intimacy and depth, over quicksand in France, insomnia in Cambodia, up a volcano in Rwanda, spinning through the eye of a snowstorm in Bismarck, and atop a dumpster in her own backyard, this New York Times bestselling author, award-winning essayist and journalist for Vogue and Travel + Leisure immerses us in places waiting to be experienced and some that may be more than we're up for. She encounters spies, angels, leopards, shoes, the odd rattlesnake, a random head of state, and many times over, the ghosts of her past. Each subsequent voyage leads to revelations about her search for solitude, a capacity for adventure, and always, a longing for home.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for A Hard Place to Leave

“Intrepid and empathetic, gifted with the dispassionate gaze of a born observer…a  harmonious collage of worldview and character, a wunderkammer of experiences in a life fully lived.” —Melissa Febos, The New York Times

“Dazzling….inspiring and beautifully written, A Hard Place to Leave is a must-read for any woman traveler—and a must-read for women in general.” —Forbes

“Along the way, DeSanctis encounters spies and love interests, but it’s her lushly polished writing that makes this book a joy to read.” —The Washington Post

“The essays might be framed as travel writing, but they are just as much stories of self-definition that take place here, there, and everywhere.” —Vogue

“Excellent—I can’t rave about it enough.” —Air Mail

“The luminous essays of journalist Marcia DeSanctis’s A Hard Place to Leave juxtapose the restless search for elsewhere with longing for home.” —ForeWord Magazine starred review

“DeSanctis writes fabulously, brutally and beautifully.” —Electric Lit

“Marcia DeSanctis is an icon in the realm of travel writing, and essay writing as well.” —Air Mail

“These probing, achingly beautiful essays form an indelible portrait of a life. Who is this woman with her many, at times contradictory, facets? She is an adventurer, journalist, wife, mother, daughter, her world set spinning by the brilliance of her mind, the tenacity of her love for her family, and the intensity of her longing to be anywhere but here. Through the very act of interrogating her own restlessness, Marcia DeSanctis provides us with a tantalizing window into a rich and singular world.” —Dani Shapiro, New York Times bestselling author of Inheritance

“Marcia DeSanctis’s A Hard Place to Leave is perfumed with lush, luminous language as she sweeps us all across the globe. From Moscow to Cape Town, quiet New England to Sweden, these tender portraits grow on us like a spring garden.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil, New York Times bestselling author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments 

“DeSanctis weaves together both ordinary and extraordinary life events to reveal universal truths.” —Princeton Alumni Weekly

“These essays are pulled from a decade of writing and span 40 years of experience and inquiry, with intimate pictures of home woven throughout. They’re honest, warm, and thoughtful. This collection feels relatable to both a reader who might be a world traveler and also someone who wants to take those journeys via the written word.” —Lisa Peet, Bloom

“Never has a travel memoir put the ordinary and the extraordinary in such tight and revelatory conversation. A Hard Place to Leave brims over with intelligence and human truth. More than just a recounting of a life boldly and peripatetically lived, it’s a reckoning with the passage of time, with one’s own undying urges. I knew myself better by the end of this book, thanks to the fierce honesty and perpetual questing of Marcia DeSanctis.” —Colleen Kinder, editor of Letter to a Stranger

“There is such honesty and feeling on every page of Marcia DeSanctis’s book—her avowal to push past the conventional boundaries of women’s lives, her rediscovery of travel and solitude, her celebration of family, friendship, and homecoming—that I felt delightedly transported and deeply inspired.” —Jasmin Darznik, New York Times bestselling author of The Bohemians

“To read this masterfully composed memoir is to better understand our beautiful, broken world, our complex tethers to home and family, and our own imperfect selves. DeSanctis is brilliantly attuned to the nuances of these subjects, and she navigates the hairpin turns between the three with breathtaking curiosity, elegance, wisdom, and generosity. The essays in A Hard Place to Leave are equal parts dark and luminous, ferocious and tender, universal and intimate—and the writing is some of the finest I’ve ever read in my whole damn life.” —Lavinia Spalding, author of Writing Away and editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing

“Mountain climbing. Love affairs. Diplomats who may be spies, or love affairs, or both. Marcia DeSanctis’s travel essays are thoughtful, stylish, and loaded with charm. It’s the kind of book that goes great with a glass of wine and a strong dose of wanderlust.” —Rosecrans Baldwin, author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles

“Marcia DeSanctis is one of the finest travel writers working today…a spellbinding new book of travel essays…” —Pauline Frommer, The Frommer’s Travel Show

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177985275
Publisher:	Travelers' Tales Guides, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/26/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

17. Milk, Bread, Butter, Chocolate

It was one of my more notable detours in a lifetime of impractical diversions on the road.

Last summer, on the way from Lourdes to the airport in Biarritz, I made a hasty exit north off the A63 for Bayonne, a riverside city in the Pays Basque, just inland from the glittering beaches of the Atlantic coast. In truth, the whole route had been a detour. Good sense would have dictated that I fly out of Pau that day, which was much closer both to Lourdes and to where I had been staying for a week on the edge of the Pyrénées. Plus, I was not overly eager to pass through hordes of chi-chi vacationers inching through airport traffic on a summer evening on the Côte Basque, of which Biarritz was the de facto capital. Although I risked being late for the 8 p.m. flight to Paris—the first leg of my trip back home—this was no ordinary pitstop. I could anticipate the constellation of sorrows and regrets that were all but certain to engulf me if, because of some airplane reservation, I lost my chance to pull over for Chocolat Toast at Cazenave.

I had finished my work in the Pyrénées, a story on a magnificent rare peach that harvests during a short week in July. I had gone to seek perfection and had found it, plucked pink and ready by the bushel in the Béarn. Not that I was dreading home exactly, but I was reluctant to pry myself away from southwestern France and the markets filled with lavender soaps and ripe summer fruit. No doubt I would miss the feathery lightness I experienced on the drives past fields of Jurançon grapes, and the acres of sunflowers that tinged with yellow the visible expanse of the horizon. Rather than watch my fortnight in France dribble away on the lackluster highway to the plane, I sought a resounding conclusion to it. A moment that would buttress me for the journey home and the work that awaited me.

Shifting gears in my little Citroën, I began to collate the chores by category, none of which I had thought about for even a moment since I had been away. The abrupt mental switch made both the car and my heart rate accelerate. A couple of appliances in disrepair, taxes to be filed, a broken attic window to be replaced. Did the outdoor spigot get fixed yet? Was there half and half for our coffee in the morning, indispensable for our treasured routine with oatmeal? Must fill the fridge. I visualized a vast leafy matrix of weeds obscuring the flowers in my garden, stunting their growth. In twenty-four hours, I would probably be down by the pond deploying my hedge trimmer, cutting back the wall of green brush that would certainly be marching toward my back porch.

This was the life that I cherished and accepted in full as mine, replete with duties domestic and otherwise. I was as efficient looking after the needs of my home as I was looking after my husband, children and dog. The demands of our overgrown world suited me, now that I had not lived in a city for well over a decade. Mark was deep into a big commission, and I was excited to learn the details of his progress—of his carving, hammering, slicing, fork-lifting. Our daughter was home for the summer and I longed for her company. It was time to sit down with my notes, and weave the many bits of string gathered for this story into a narrative. Yet I knew by now that the distance between sweet reentry and the urge for going could, sometimes, be perilously short. Above all, there was no telling when I would return to the Pays Basque.

Every great food city has its emblematic dish: Singapore has chili crab, New Orleans has beignets, Brussels has moules frites. The singular aspect of Chocolat Toast, though, is that this signature Bayonnais concoction is served only at one place in town, Cazenave, a third-generation family-owned shop on the Rue Port Neuf.

Its construction is simple: a cup of foamy hot chocolate as thick as Greek yogurt with a stalagmite of whipped cream on the side, two slices of buttered brioche toast and a generous pitcher of ice water (presumably to cut the blood fats swirling around after ingesting this achingly rich combination). Served at breakfast, at l’heure du thé, or right before closing time, the Chocolat Toast ritual is perhaps the sole obligation of the visitor to Bayonne. This may be an especially forceful coda for departing pilgrims, like I was: spent from praying for miracles at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, craving the earth’s most heavenly comfort food.

“People often stop here because it’s a tradition, which is both because of Cazenave itself and also because of the history of chocolate in Bayonne,” owner Pantxoa Bimboire later told me. A child of the Basque country, his grandmother had been a waitress at the salon de thé in the rear of the chocolate shop. In 1930, she convinced her husband to sell his jewelry store and buy Cazenave. Even then, a tray laden with Chocolat Toast was the iconic specialty of this small city on the banks of the Nive and Adour rivers, the ancestral home of the cocoa bean in France, which had journeyed there from Mexico, via Spain and Portugal.

The Cazenave shop window is a rainbow of chocolate bars in gem-hued wrappings, arranged like boxes of Crayola crayons. Normally, I’d stop to swoon over the stylish packaging, but it was late that July afternoon, and I only had a two-hour window to return the Citroën and catch my plane. I half-raced through the store to the tea room. As a Bayonne landmark, it is ravishing.

Lined with smoky, century-old mirrors, the vestibule is suffused with Belle Époque glamour, the kind unfortunate restaurateurs in the New World try pathetically to mimic. To further the sensation of being ensconced in a jewel case, I seated myself under the milky white and gold stained-glass dome, installed in the 19th century. Not wanting to rush, I cast the briefest glance at my watch anyway. As the server quietly placed a simple white tray before me, I imagined the fanfare that could—and maybe should—accompany this hallowed ritual. Instead, I rearranged the components, all of which, except the glass pitcher of water, were served on delicate, rose-speckled china. I spooned a heap of whipped cream as thick as butter onto the chocolate, and gently stirred. Gulping my first mouthful, I felt a stab of pleasure that rendered me motionless. An onlooker might have wondered about my beatific countenance, why my eyes closed and my lips curved upwards.

There is nothing terribly complicated about the recipe, mostly unchanged since long before my first time breakfasting and ruminating on Chocolat Toast thirty years ago. Yes, the chocolate tablets are now made from organic beans grown in Peru or Ecuador, but the hot milk poured over them is still from cows who pasture in the hilly Pays Basque, as is the cream for the thick chantilly. The brioche toast is sliced from a special golden loaf, created by a local baker only for Cazenave. Most unusually, the foam that provides a tantalizing lid to the hot chocolate is still whipped by hand using a wooded mousseuse—beater—fashioned from boxwood. “It will always be the same,” says Bimboire, “because this is the heritage of Bayonne.”

And, I decided, it is somehow my heritage too. Almost half a lifetime ago, I took a train to Bayonne, in search of a cheaper hotel than the one I had booked near the beach in Biarritz. What I found there was some kind of culinary perfection, and a dish I have, since then, now and again, physically craved. This time, I was drawn to this gilded refuge not simply for the fat and sugar, cream and cocoa, ice and water convened on a tray in sheer gustatory harmony. Indeed, it is almost mathematically pure. Sweet chocolate compliments savory toast, chilled water tempers steaming cocoa, whose creamy smoothness is startled by the crunch of buttered brioche. No, it was something else. Here one simply encounters the most elusive, essential, and even miraculous of virtues: balance.

Often, when I traveled, I pondered which of the beautiful but imperfect of my two existences—the home one or the away one—was real and which was the response to it. At this moment, I was suspended in that anticipatory space between both of them, making a beeline for what will sustain me and fortify my journey back to the people I love. On this summer day, in this tea room, I was not merely satisfied. I was also, for the briefest moment, still.

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